Re: [PATCH 1/2] Unification of user message strings

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Mar 19, 2012, 20:53 UTC
Message-ID: <20120319205300.GA3039@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <1332179503-2992-2-git-send-email-vfr@lyx.org>

On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 06:51:42PM +0100, Vincent van Ravesteijn wrote:

> Rewrite user messages to stick to a uniform style for all messages.
> From the surrounding code, the following guidelines were deduced:
> - messages start with a capital,

I was surprised by this one, as I think we generally use lower-case messages. Grepping shows that lower-case has a slight edge, though it is far from decided:

  $ git grep -E '(error|die)\((_\()?"[A-Z]' | wc -l
  810
  $ git grep -E '(error|die)\((_\()?"[a-z]' | wc -l
  1267

-Peff

PS I was curious if it was simply that some people prefer one way and
   not the other, but the results are quite mixed. Below is the result
   of a small script I wrote that calculates "upper-casedness" per
   author using the above regexes and git-blame.

   The first number is the percentage of an author's messages starting
   with upper-case characters, followed by the total number of messages
   for that author, followed by the author's name. I limited the output
   to the top 20 by total number, as there is a long tail of people
   contributing just a few messages.

      0.14 37 Martin Koegler
      0.14 42 Johannes Sixt
      0.14 81 Jonathan Nieder
      0.16 31 Pierre Habouzit
      0.18 92 Nicolas Pitre
      0.20 66 Jeff King
      0.20 87 Linus Torvalds
      0.26 348 Junio C Hamano
      0.35 20 Christian Couder
      0.37 43 Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy
      0.39 18 René Scharfe
      0.41 32 Miklos Vajna
      0.45 270 Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
      0.47 129 Shawn O. Pearce
      0.50 36 David Barr
      0.54 57 Johannes Schindelin
      0.62 39 Ramkumar Ramachandra
      0.67 21 Daniel Barkalow
      0.76 59 Johan Herland

   You can see that some people are usually lowercase and some are usually
   uppercase, but there are many people near 50%, doing both equally.
   There's also some inaccuracy in my simplistic sampling. For example,
   of my 13 upper-case messages, 11 of them are "BUG:".