Re: What's cooking in git.git (Apr 2013, #05; Mon, 15)

From: Phil Hord <phil.hord@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 16, 2013, 22:45 UTC
Message-ID: <CABURp0qGYG4T+t36=Us328YdLzy9KjBOWot2gSOk=FgCRUCLnQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAMP44s0a2VsPBMd9Vrrhwdw=SPp2HrvDdXZ9Dmzhr9A6T+Sz7w@mail.gmail.com>

On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 3:04 PM, Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 4:59 AM, Thomas Rast <trast@inf.ethz.ch> wrote:
>> A cursory look^W^Wreview of the messages in fc/remote-hg:
>
> [skipping irrelevant comments]
>
> I'm sorry, did you actually hit an issue that required to look at the
> commit message to understand where the issue came from? No? Then I
> won't bother with hypotheticals.
>
> If you want to waste your time, by all means, rewrite all my commit
> messages with essays that nobody will ever read. I'm not going to do
> that for some hypothetical case that will never happen. I'm not going
> to waste my time.

This is not a hypothetical. Almost every time I bisect a regression in git.git, I find the commit message tells me exactly why the commit did what it did and what the expected result was. I find this to be amazingly useful. Do I need to show you real instances of that happening? No. I promise it did, though.

Of course, 99% of the commit messages may never be useful to me or anyone else. But we do not eschew them altogether. The 1% I have to rely on are nearly always helpful and clear, and that is the part I care about.

If you will not waste your time to write a decent commit message, why do you waste our time asking us to review and accept ill-defined patches? Here, of course, I use the royal "us" as I do not review your patches. I do not know why that is; I suppose you patch things outside of my interests, but it may also be that your patches are simply incomprehensible by design.

Phil