Re: [PATCH 1/2] commit: do not cleanup template

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: May 7, 2011, 22:31 UTC
Message-ID: <7vei4auoqb.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <BANLkTinvwjoa4z2JEiuPD44BV2V_m50VYQ@mail.gmail.com>

"Boris 'billiob' Faure" <billiob@gmail.com> writes:

Show 12 quoted lines

> On Sat, May 7, 2011 at 22:13, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
>> […]
>> My gut feeling is that it is relatively easy to justify [1/2]. We prepare
>> the message file to be edited by the committer in sb by reading from
>> different message sources, and usually we would want to clean up what is
>> in sb before writing it out, but you may want to enforce a particular
>> format by using the template (such as having a leading whitespace) and the
>> way to tweak and fix that appearance should be by editing the template,
>> not by automatically running stripspace() here [*1*] when the message came
>> from the template.
>
> That's exactly my point of view.

Please describe these things in the proposed commit log message. A submitted patch should not force reviewers and future readers of "git log" to guess why this change was made.

While reviewing, reviewers can ask what problem you are trying to solve, why you did things in one particular way, etc., and they may be able to extract the necessary information from you like I just did during this exchange.

But people who are reading "git log" in the future and bisecting the code to see why this change was made 6 months ago will not have that luxury, and even if they manage to find you and asked, you may not remember why.

Without having enough clue to understand what you wanted to achieve, they may make changes that breaks your unstated expectation, and they would not even know they broke things.