Re: [PATCH/RFC] fmt-merge-msg: add a blank line after people info

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: May 16, 2012, 02:02 UTC
Message-ID: <CA+55aFyX66RpUA2Xh8drGErHB7Wuni20cUAMGawLsqG6MTTohA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7v62bxdwgs.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 1:24 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

>
> Now, computing this efficiently may not be trivial, as you would need N^2
> reachability analysis when pulling in N commits.  Among 2000 recent merges
> I sampled from the kernel history, 70+ pull in more than 1000 commits (the
> largest one d4bbf7e77 pulls in 21k commits).

So I have to say, for my purposes, it not only might be inefficient, but it can still be very misleading.

I actually care most about the person I personally pull from. And if he is a submaintainer who has other submaintainers, it can be that following the commit history doesn't show him at *all*. He might have done just a fast-forward merge, but he's still the person *I* want to credit.

So I'm getting the feeling that the "count authors/committers" may be cute, but it's not necessarily all that relevant. It's the kind of information you can see later from the git tree itself.

(Admittedly, so it the shortlog we put in the merge, so that "you can
find it later in the git tree itself" not *that* great of an argument
- the real argument for me is that it doesn't matter what you count,
you'll not necessarily get the actual piece of information I care
about..).

So I think it's somewhat interesting information, and I haven't really disliked seeing it, but I have mostly edited it away (although I see that some other maintainers also run modern versions of git and have left it in place, so we do have those in the kernel).

The one merge commit of mine that has it, I edited it so that the "via C Committer" was on the same lne as the "By A Author" information.

So I'm not entirely convinced yet. I don't *dislike* the concept, but I could definitely do without it (or maybe have it in the commented part of the commit message, so that you'd have to explicitly edit it to show up).

                       Linus