Re: Enabling scissors by default?

From: Phillip Susi <psusi@ubuntu.com>
Date: Jan 8, 2013, 23:25 UTC
Message-ID: <50ECAAE2.2020507@ubuntu.com>
In-Reply-To: <7vvcb7b8lc.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

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On 01/08/2013 05:42 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> It is very easy to miss misidentification of scissors line; as a 
> dangerous, potentially information losing option, I do not think
> it should be on by default.

I suppose if it only requires one instance of >8 or <8 and one -, it might be *slightly* dangerous, but if it required a slightly longer minimum line length, it would be pretty darn unlikely to get triggered by accident, and of course, is easily disabled.

Show 5 quoted lines

> Another reason (and this is the original one) why it is not
> enabled is to discourage the contributors from overusing scissors
> -- >8 -- line.  If you always have to write too much stuff before
> the proper explanation of your patch, so that the integrator has to
> use -c option all the time, you are explaining your patches wrong.

I often see patches being tweaked in response to feedback and resubmitted, usually with a description of what has changed since the previous version. Such descriptions don't need to be in the change log when it is finally applied and seem a perfect use of scissors.

Usually such version to version descriptions are put in a cover letter, but if you are only submitting a single patch instead of an entire series, using a cover letter seems silly when you could just put the comments in one email and clearly mark them as not needing to go into the final changelog.

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