Re: [Gnu-arch-users] What's the use of the "keywords: " field ?

[Miles Bader]

On Tue, May 18, 2004 at 01:08:19AM +0200, Matthieu Moy wrote:
> What I'd like to have is a convention of a set of keywords that people
> would use. Say "bugfix",  "indentation", "feature", ... and then, have
> a query function like
> 
> $ tla revisions --keyword bugfix
> 
> to get the list of patches containing this keyword. 

Feel free to add such a feature.... :-)

I think for anyone sophisticated to actually be using tla, the _potential_ of
the Keywords: header should be obvious, but people are lazy, so it has to be
_really useful_ enough to get them to go to the effort of classifying their
changesets.

My impression is that typically keyword systems are more useful in theory
than in practice, because it actually is a fair amount of effort to come up
with a useful set of keywords, and to decide which ones apply when creating a
document/changeset/whatever.  "Generic" keywords (bugfix etc) are so broad
that their utility for searches seems a bit questionable.

In my personal experience, tla promotes frequent committing, so the `keyword
selection' burden is higher than it would be with e.g., journal articles or
whatever.

In any case, when the user _does_ leave the header empty it shouldn't end up
in the patch-log.

Oh, another thing -- since many people use the -s'summary msg' (or -L) option
to make the log file, if keywords are useful, there should be a way of adding
that header from the command line too (e.g. -k'keyword ...')

-Miles
-- 
Freedom's just another word, for nothing left to lose   --Janis Joplin