Re: [PATCH] Rephrased git-describe description

From: Kevin Ballard <kevin@sb.org>
Date: May 14, 2008, 16:57 UTC
Message-ID: <19174A63-BE44-4898-9CAD-935BE1A28FFF@sb.org>
In-Reply-To: <1210774947-27995-1-git-send-email-ian.hilt@gmail.com>

Sorry for the double-posting, Ian, but my first email was rejected from the list because my mail client attached an HTML part.

On May 14, 2008, at 9:22 AM, Ian Hilt wrote:

Show 23 quoted lines

> Made description more readable.
>
> Signed-off-by: Ian Hilt <ian.hilt@gmail.com>
> ---
> Documentation/git-describe.txt |    7 ++++---
> 1 files changed, 4 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)
>
> diff --git a/Documentation/git-describe.txt b/Documentation/git- 
> describe.txt
> index d9aa2f2..f3f07e4 100644
> --- a/Documentation/git-describe.txt
> +++ b/Documentation/git-describe.txt
> @@ -13,9 +13,10 @@ SYNOPSIS
> DESCRIPTION
> -----------
> The command finds the most recent tag that is reachable from a
> -commit, and if the commit itself is pointed at by the tag, shows
> -the tag.  Otherwise, it suffixes the tag name with the number of
> -additional commits and the abbreviated object name of the commit.
> +commit.  If the tag points to the commit, then only the tag is
> +shown.  Otherwise, the number of additional commits on top of the
> +tagged object and the abbreviated object name of the most recent
> +commit are suffixed to the tag name.

I disagree that this is more readable. Specifically that last sentence. In the original description it tells me what it's doing (suffixing) before it tells me what objects it's using. In your version, it tells me the objects, then tells me what it's doing (suffixing), so I have to effectively process the sentence in reverse. In other words, it took me two readings of your last sentence to match the one reading of the original last sentence.

Also, you should use a more descriptive commit description. At the very least, do something like

git-describe: Make description more readable.

-Kevin Ballard

-- 
Kevin Ballard
http://kevin.sb.org
kevin@sb.org
http://www.tildesoft.com