Re: [PATCH v3] git-p4: add option to preserve user names

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: May 8, 2011, 17:32 UTC
Message-ID: <7voc3dt7wq.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <4DC67756.3090002@diamand.org>

Luke Diamand <luke@diamand.org> writes:

Show 7 quoted lines

>> It looks to me that the message is not helping the users, even though it
>> may help as a debugging aid for git-p4 developers.
>
> Should I just remove it?
>
> I guess it only adds a small amount of information which could be
> explained in the instructions.

I was trying to get a feel of how much thinking went behind that message, by suggesting a possible improvement to help users who forgot to pass the new option when they might have wanted to, instead of just assuring users who did pass the option when the command did the right thing for them.

People learn to quickly ignore repeated and regular messages. They will learn that they will get that message whenever they pass the new option, and they learn that most of the time it says what they wanted, and will easily miss when the username you put in the message is different from what they expect.

In our commit template, we say "# Author: author name" when and only when it is different from you. Most of the time, you are committing your own commit, so this line is _unusual_ and that is very much deliberate.

If you do not think of a good way to improve the "help" part of the patch, that is Ok. We are still making progress by giving a functionality that has been missing.

To remove or to keep, I am less qualified to judge than either you or Pete. I'm not the primary audience. If you think it helps users, leave it in. Otherwise remove.

Thanks.