From: Phil Hord Date: Tue, 16 Apr 2013 22:45:46 GMT Subject: Re: What's cooking in git.git (Apr 2013, #05; Mon, 15) Message-ID: In-Reply-To: On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 3:04 PM, Felipe Contreras wrote: > On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 4:59 AM, Thomas Rast 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