Re: stopping patches from just floating by

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jan 11, 2009, 23:06 UTC
Message-ID: <7vprito32u.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <874p05k1ie.fsf@jidanni.org>

jidanni@jidanni.org writes:

> I see. Say, for my forthcoming 40 minor grammar fixes that affect 20
> files in Documentation/*, I just couldn't bear spamming this list with
> more that one or two [PATCH] mails. OK one long mail it will be then,
> with several commits encompassing many diffs. Hope that will be OK.

It probably won't be Ok, as earlier documentation patches from you that were smaller had good bits that were applied and not so good bits that were dropped, and I'd refuse to pick and choose only good bits from one single large patch myself. The tradeoff between "minor grammar fixes" and my time spent to do so is not good enough.

Please send in small isolated pieces so that people do not have to comment "in this patch, this and that rewordings are very good clarification, but this other hunk adds noise without adding much signal".

And by "isolated", I do not mean "one mail per patched file".

For example, if you fix many misused 3rd person singular verbs that ends with 's' that are used for subject that is not 3rd person singular, that is one topic and one patch can fix an error of that kind in all of 20 files.

On the other hand, if you conflate such a fix with a new explanation of an option (which may or may not be adding more noise than the signal) to the same file in a single e-mailed patch, you will force people to say "this part is good but that part is not". That's not the isolation I am referring to.