Commit messages and git branches

[Schanzenbach, Martin]

Dear developers,

in light of recent commits and generally over the past few releases I would 
like to urge you to
adhere to our commit message guidelines. They are quite simple:

- Use meaningful commit messages that can be used in a ChangeLog entry
- Minor changes/fix messages can be short and MUST be prefixed with "-"

We generate the ChangeLog update using a script on each release so it is 
generating
a lot of work if we have to manually purge release messages such as "fix" or 
"cleanup" which
do not convey any useful information in a changelog.

It is also reasonable to prefix your commit messages with the subsystem the fix 
is for,
for example:

"
IDENTITY: Fix wrong key construction for anonymous ECDSA identity
"

If you accidentally forgot to add a "-" for a commit you can change the message 
using

$ git commit --amend

if you had multiple minor commits where you forgot you can squash them.

If you already pushed those commits to master this will not work, however,
Which brings me to the second point:

If you think you may forget this for a longer period of time during your work,
please USE A BRANCH. It is an advisable idea *in general*.
Our git is set up so that developers can setup user branches:

dev/<username>/<yourbranchname>

When you create a branch in this manner, you can force push it or delete it 
yourself.
Other branches can only be force pushed or removed by admins.

Thank you for the cooperation

Martin

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