[asterisk-dev] JIRA, Commit Messages, and Smart Commits (oh my)

[Matthew Jordan]

Hey everyone -

Due to a security vulnerability in JIRA, we recently had to upgrade
JIRA to version 6.2. While this was a good thing (tm), it did break
the snot out of the Subversion plugin. That plugin does a number of
things; one of those things is auto-closing issues based on the commit
message.

Traditionally, the plugin used the following nomenclature to close an issue:

(closes issue JIRA_ISSUE)

Likewise, tagging a commit with the following linked the commit
message to the issue:

(issue JIRA_ISSUE)

While I'd like to believe the Subversion plugin will get fixed at some
point, our initial forays into getting it fixed haven't been fruitful.
Part of this is reticence on our part to 'customize' the plugin or our
JIRA instance further (more on that in a bit); another large part is
Atlassian appears to be focussing on an alternate method for tying
commit messages back to issues (more on that in a bit as well). Long
story short, it doesn't appear like anyone is in a hurry to fix the
old Subversion plugin.

Question: why not hack on the Subversion plugin and/or JIRA?

Answer: we could hack around on the Subversion plugin and/or JIRA (it
isn't clear yet who is at fault), but the more customization we put
into it the harder it is to upgrade the project's JIRA instance. This
makes it harder to respond quickly to security vulnerabilities. We've
done a lot of work over the past year or so minimizing the
customizations so that we can respond quickly to said vulnerabilities
in JIRA, and it's been very handy. Unless there's a giant outcry
against what I'm about to propose, I'd hope that we don't have to try
and modify the plugin ourselves.

Question: what is this alternate method that Atlassian has?

Answer: Atlassian Smart Commits [1].

Since we have Fisheye [2] integration with JIRA, we can use a
different commit message format that will trigger the smart commits in
Fisheye, which will do all of the auto-closing for us in JIRA. In
fact, as the name 'smart commit' implies, it can do a lot more than
just close the issue, including leaving comments and other fanciness.
It does mean however that our commit message format will have to
change.

The biggest implication of changing the commit message format is
making sure that patch submitters are properly attributed, such that
the release summary scripts and other parts of the Asterisk project
pick up who actually wrote the patch. Right now, I'm proposing
something like the following:

ASTERISK-12345 #close
ASTERISK-12345 #comment patch my_awesome_fix.diff submitted by jdoe
(license 12345)

You can see a commit that contains some smart commit tags in it here
[3], which use a format similar to what is above.

What do you all think?

Matt

[1] https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/AOD/Processing+JIRA+issues+with+commit+messages
[2] https://code.asterisk.org/code/
[3] http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-commits/2014-March/067893.html

-- 
Matthew Jordan
Digium, Inc. | Engineering Manager
445 Jan Davis Drive NW - Huntsville, AL 35806 - USA
Check us out at: http://digium.com & http://asterisk.org