From: René Scharfe Date: Sun, 08 Sep 2013 15:21:23 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH] branch: use $curr_branch_short more Message-ID: <522C95F3.5030308@web.de> In-Reply-To: Am 31.08.2013 19:20, schrieb Felipe Contreras: > A summary should contain as much information that would allow me to > skip the commit message as possible. > > If I can't tell from the summary if I can safely skip the commit > message, the summary is not doing a good job. > > "trivial simplification" explains the "what", and the "why" at the > same time, and allows most people to skip the commit message, thus is > a good summary. No patch should be skipped on the mailing list. As you wrote, trivial patches can still be wrong. When going through the history I can see that quickly recognizing insubstantial changes is useful, but if I see a summary twice then in my mind forms a big question mark -- why did the same thing had to be done yet again? As an example, both 0d12e59f (pull: replace unnecessary sed invocation) and bc2bbc45 (pull, rebase: simplify to use die()) could arguably have had the summary "trivial simplification", but I'm glad the author went with something a bit more specific. I agree that some kind of tagging with keywords like "trivial", "typo" and so on can be helpful, though. > Again, triviality and correctness are two separate different things. > The patch is trivial even if you can't judge it's correctness. Well, in terms of impact I agree. > To me, what you are describing is an obvious patch, not a trivial one. > An obvious patch is so obvious that you can judge it's correctness > easily by looking at the diff, a trivial one is of little importance. That's one definition; I think I had the mathematical notion in mind that calls proofs trivial which are immediately evident. René