[petsc-dev] keeping track of work and its projects

[Barry Smith]

> On Oct 25, 2016, at 9:47 PM, Jed Brown <jed at jedbrown.org> wrote:
> 
> Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> writes:
> 
>>   PETSc developers,
>> 
>>     This message is mostly directed at petsc-developers at ANL but could be useful for everyone.
>> 
>>     It is sometimes useful to track for what project and how much
>>     time is spent on particular commits in PETSc. If you add a file
>>     called .gitmessage in your home directory it is automatically
>>     included in the message when you do a git commit. 
> 
> I believe you need to do
> 
>  git config commit.template ~/.gitmessage
> 
> to get this behavior.  You can use --global if you want it in all your
> repositories.
> 

   Thanks, I probably did this and then promptly forgot I did it.

>>     I suggest putting the following in your .gitmessage file
>> 
>> 
>> Funded-by:
>> Project:
>> Time:
>> Reported-by:
>> Thanks-to:
>> 
>> then when you write your git commit message you can delete the lines that are not relevant and put in information that is relevant. This can help us track and justify the work done under various funded projects. If you don't know what funded by or project to list just ask.
>> 
>> Make the time in decimals of an hour for easy post processing, for example .2 hours. Reported-by: is for bug reports mostly while Thanks-to: is for feature requests or suggestions on how to do things better.
> 
> Barry, if you want this to be machine readable, I would suggest listing
> out all the relevant grants and projects that you can think of so that
> they are spelled the same way each time.  (The developer deletes all the
> others on the line when editing the commit message.)

   These are pretty diverse. I'm not sure I even know what they should be.

   A bash against git. It would be nice if I could attach this thing to the petsc repository (then I could update the funding sources weekly :-) so it came up for everyone automatically when they did a git commit in petsc. Can you suggest this functionality to the git maintainers if it doesn't currently exist?

Barry