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Bug 98224

Summary: Auto-populate commit message
Product: [Eclipse Project] Platform Reporter: Andrew Overholt <overholt>
Component: CVSAssignee: platform-cvs-inbox <platform-cvs-inbox>
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX QA Contact:
Severity: enhancement    
Priority: P3 CC: pmuldoon
Version: 3.1Keywords: helpwanted
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: All   
Whiteboard:

Description Andrew Overholt CLA 2005-06-02 22:46:31 EDT 
I've been looking into setting things up to auto-populate CVS commit messages
based upon ChangeLog entries but I'm sort of banging my head against the wall.

At the time of the commit dialog being brought up, do we know what files have
been changed?  If so, we can stub out a ChangeLog entry as the commit message,
right?  Ideally we would re-work the ChangeLog plugin [1] to auto-populate
itself based upon what files have changed and use the resulting entry as the
proposed commit message (this could probably be toggle-able if people don't like
that as the default - it is in lots of open source projects).

I know there are issues when you don't use ChangeLogs, but those are easy to
work around.

There's also the question of integration with other source control systems so is
the team synchronization stuff where this should actually be filed?

I guess I'm just looking for direction here if anyone has any to give :)

[1]
http://sourceware.org/eclipse/#eclipse-changelog
Comment 1 Michael Valenta CLA 2005-06-03 08:45:22 EDT 
First of all, we must keep in mind that some servers specify a commit template 
that is to be used. This could potentially conflict with any commit comment 
generated by the ChangeLog plugin. 

Now, if we were to address this properly, what we would need is an extension 
point in CVS where 3rd parties (i.e. the ChangeLog plugin) could register a 
commit comment generator. Ideally the user could identify which comment 
generator to use on a project by project basis (thus dealing with the presence 
or absence of the ChangeLog plugin or any other plugin that generated 
comments). The default generator would use the template from the server or the 
comment from an outgoing change set if one is defined for the files being 
committed.

I would suggest that the extension point class look something like this

   public abstract class CommitCommentGenerator {
       public abstract String generateComment(SyncInfoSet set);
   }

The SyncInfoSet would contain all the files that are being committed.

The main stumbling block here is that the CVS plugin has no official API. We 
would need to decide whether this should be offical API or something that is 
internal that clients use anyway (like everything else in the CVS plugins).
Comment 2 Michael Valenta CLA 2006-06-16 10:56:15 EDT 
We do not plan on addressing this issue but we will consider patches.