[python-committers] Please edit the commit message when merge a PR

[Terry Reedy]

On 7/10/2017 10:49 AM, Berker Peksağ wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 10, 2017 at 4:14 PM, Serhiy Storchaka <storchaka at gmail.com> wrote:
>> When a PR is consistent on several commits, the final commit message
>> composed by GitHub contains messages of all these commits: "fix typo",
>> "address yyy comments", "revert zzz". If the initial commit message
>> contained errors (e.g. absent issue number), it is easy to edit the title
>> and text of a PR, but the initial commit message lefts unchanged. GitHub
>> allows to edit the commit message of squashed commit, and please don't
>> ignore this possibility. Otherwise the commit message in the repository will
>> be ugly if not worse.
> 
> +1! (and thank you for writing this email, Serhiy)

Ditto.

> I can't think of a way to automatically prevent a PR from merging if
> body of the squashed commit contains "fix typo" commits. I think this
> is a pretty annoying problem and perhaps we should ask contributors to
> squash multiple commits themselves even if we continue to use the
> "squash and merge" option.

When people did that, we asked them not to.  When reviewing, I want to 
be able to see both commits in response to comments and the total diff 
(by clicking files at the top).  If people push a squash merge after a 
PR is approved both by CI and core reviewer, they might make a mistake. 
In any case, another round of CI is triggered.

In any case, I find editing easy.  I often delete all and copy from the 
new blurb.  When I write a patch myself, I try to write at least some 
commit messages that should remain in the final result.  So I might copy 
some commit messages into the blurb.