Hack/Work Around for Log Message Templates?

Hi guys,

Some advice if you would be so kind.

Background:

I'm hoping to move our dev organization over to Subversion sometime in the fairly short term. I finally got a successfull cvs2svn after editing a few hundred RCS file that were boogered in various ways and was happy happy happy. I was actually typing up to e-mail to get volunteers to test everything out, perform their normal operations, etc.

That's when I ran into an issue that is a show stopper in our case. We use CVS commit templates as an integration to our larger SCM system.

Basically we have a template:

Active Issues:
Resolved Issues:
Description:

Where the Issues fields contain Scarab IDs and Description is more of the traditional commit message.

We have a precommit hook that makes sure the Issues: field have properly formatted IDs and that Description at least gets minimally filled in. I assume I can do this by modifying one of the hook scripts appropriately. (Subversion seems a lot more flexible than CVS on that front).

However, a little doc searching followed by bug database diving revealed that 1973 (Log message templates) wasn't yet implemented.

So, I am wondering what would be a good work around until 1973 trickles up to the TODO list?

Maybe setting the editor variable to a script? I'm not sure how it works in the svn case.

I'm trying to avoid:

* Developer does an SVN commit
* Developer composes a nice long commit message about his commit, enough to bring a tear to the eye of any build manager
* Developer curses "I forgot to load the template"

or

* Developer does an SVN commit
* Developer pops up with the template and the message from the previous commit
* Developer curses and deletes out all the old info before entering his commit information

While the idea of moving to SVN seems generally popular. I want to grease the wheels as much as possible and endure the minimum amount of grief from the "moved my cheese" crowd.

Any ideas for clever work-alikes?

Thanks much
-Brian
Received on Thu Apr 14 07:34:07 2005