Format for JDK 6/7 changeset comments?

[Mark Reinhold]

> Date: Mon, 05 Nov 2007 22:16:54 -0800 (PST)
> From: iris.clark at sun.com

> ...
> 
>   For example:
> 
>     4853841: Nervous text demo displays wrong version
>     Review: iris, duke
>     Credit: mr - for extending the demo to accept arguments
> 
> I favor the compactness of the first format; but the second is more
> extensible and gives us a simple means to recognise key contributions
> besides simple authorship or review.

I think recognizing contributions from those who don't (yet) have commit
rights is very important.  Extensibility for the future is good too.

I'm a little wary of a "credits" section turning into a long chunk of
arbitrary text, in the extreme kind of like the infinitely-long credits
crawl that you see at the end of most movies these days.  The goal here
isn't to give credit to every last person who helped with the change, but
rather to acknowledge non-committers who contribute whole changes.  I'd
rather see just a simple acknowledgment listing the contributor's e-mail
address, e.g.,

    Contributed-by: Random Hacker <hack at gnu.org>

We can change "Review:" to "Reviewed-by:" as well, to stress the analogy
with RFC-822 and the fact that changeset comments aren't intended to be
arbitrary text.

- Mark