Two, I think any attempt to tell the developers and committers that they need to change their workflow to adapt to some system is bound to fail, so, I have asked, just what changed would you all be willing to actually *do*? Tom Lane is pretty good at noting a bug number in his commit messages, for example. Would he be willing to modify that slightly to make it easier to machine parse? Would you be willing to add a bug number to your commit messages? I'm not asking for guarantees. Actually I'm not really asking for anything, I'm just trying to figure out what the parameters of a solution might be. If the answer to that is "no, I'm not willing to change anything at all", that's fine, it just colors what might be done and how much automation I or someone else might be able to write.
I'd personally be willing to put machine-parseable metadata into my commit messages provided that:
1. I'm not the only one doing it - i.e. at least 3 or 4 moderately-frequent committers are all doing it consistently and all using the same format. If Tom buys into it, that's a big plus.
I'll do whatever everybody else agrees on.
2. Adding the necessary metadata to a commit can be reasonably expected to take no more than 2 minutes in typical cases (preferably less).
3. Adding the metadata doesn't cause lines > 70 characters. I am not a fan of the "Discussion: Message-ID-Here" format which some committers have begun using, sometimes with just the message ID and sometimes with the full URL, because anything which causes horizontal scrolling makes me sad.
Perhaps we need some sort of tinyurl gadget?
We have one - postgr.es. Right now it's only really used by the API from planet postgres, but we could certainly make that possible. But that adds yet another step, doesn't it, making it take longer? And one more system dependency.