On 14/11/13 10:11, Herbert Valerio Riedel wrote:
On 2013-11-13 at 11:36:13 +0100, Simon Marlow wrote:
On 12/11/13 15:53, Joachim Breitner wrote:
Am Dienstag, den 12.11.2013, 15:24 +0000 schrieb Simon Peyton-Jones:
When Trac formats commit messages it is doing a terrible job. See for example: https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/5996
The commit message is nigh illegible until typeset without makup (see comment 10).
I believe it is a feature, not a bug: Trac encourages you to use markdown markup (which supposedly looks good also in plain text) in your commit messages. This not only makes them look nice, provides additional features like automatic linking (compare the reference to #5996 in comment 9 and comment 10).
In this case the tables should have been indented by 4 spaces, or surrounded by {{{..}}}, in the commit message to make it come out nicely.
Whether this is desirable is a different question. I like it, but the heavy users of the repository and trac need to decide what they prefer – the ability to use markup in the commit messages, or the freedom to do any kind of ascii art.
I'm with Simon on this one. I much preferred the old plain-text rendering of commit messages.
Luckily, this is an exposed trac.ini setting (for future reference: changeset.wiki_format_messages)
I've disabled wiki-rendering for commit messages so you can see the effect. As Joachim already observed, since this is an an all-or-nothing setting, you lose automatic hyperlinking to Trac tickets, Wiki pages, other changesets, and even HTTP URLs in every places where commit messages are rendered.
See for instance,
https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/changeset/5a3918febb7354e0900c4f04151599d83...
where you have to manually lookup the ticket-no. as well as the commit-id of the referenced other commit that this commit tries to compensate for.
That's unfortunate. Ideally the tickets and commit hashes should be hyperlinked. Commit logs are viewed more often in a terminal or an editor than on Trac itself, so I think markup isn't worth the effort. Also you don't get to compose your commit message in the browser, so you can't see whether you've made a markup error.
So this undermines one of Trac's principal design goals, that is
"Trac allows wiki markup in issue descriptions and commit messages, creating links and seamless references between bugs, tasks, changesets, files and wiki pages."
as is written in the introductory front-page at http://trac.edgewall.org
I don't want to start using a particular markup format (which is not markdown, it's Trac's own format AIUI) in our commit messages. What happens if we switch from Trac to something else in the future?
It's an unfortunate situation that when Trac came to life around 2005 it wasn't clear that Markdown would become so popular (and it couldn't have been used as-is without syntax extensions to allow seamless hyperlinks).
However, if you don't like Trac's Wiki markup and its primary goal of tight & seamless hyperlinking from everywhere to everywhere, why did you chose to deploy Trac in the first place?
We chose Trac because it was better than SourceForge :-) (also github wasn't usable at the time)
After all, should the GHC project ever want to switch from Trac to something else, converting the existing Trac tickets and the GHC Wiki Commentary will be quite an undertaking retaining the crossrefs as well as stripping out all Trac-isms... just saying...
PS: Btw, fwiw, http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/WikiCreole.
Obviously this is all just MHO, if everyone else wants markup in commit messages then I won't complain. Cheers, Simon