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

From: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 18, 2013, 10:55 UTC
Message-ID: <CAMP44s0KW4_Q6-d-3=M7GzWmHwy4H--FcemK4UF5FS0t3wnOgg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CALkWK0krWM4kJ5GTnQ2SL7HoNfNMNA0-xdRVbeatAFpyKW_RtA@mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 5:27 AM, Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 18 quoted lines

> Felipe Contreras wrote:
>> Except the customers are not git developers, it's git users. Git
>> developers rejecting patches because of the commit message is akin to
>> distributors rejecting products because they don't like the
>> transportation packages; they are only hurting themselves, by hurting
>> their customers.
>
> Huh?  I certainly don't develop for some "git users" I don't even know
> or care about.  In this order of precedence, my customers are:
>
> 1. Me.
> 2. People who develop git.git, whom I have to cooperate with.
> 3. People who exercise git heavily like the linux.git community, as
> opposed to some little projects that operate using pull requests on
> GitHub.
> ...
> 137. People who incidentally choose to use git.
> 138. People who incidentally choose to use git, but aren't on Linux.

As they are for most open source developers on the planet, not me. I believe a project is nothing without its users.

> And nobody is hurting anyone else.  Someone wrote some code, and
> failed to sell it to the community.  That's all happened.

If remote-hg wasn't available for users, they would be hurt; if stash wasn't available, if rebase --interactive didn't exist, if there was no msysgit, if it wasn't so fast, if the object model wasn't so simple and extensible; users would be hurt. And if users didn't have all these, there would be less users, and if there were less users, there would be less developers, and mercurial might have been more popular, and most repositories you have to work on would be in mercurial, and you might be developing mercurial right now.

But I won't bother trying to convince you that no project is more important than its users (in the words of Linus Torvalds), because most people don't see the big picture.

Show 10 quoted lines

>> I don't think so. Unless you added your Signed-off-by, you are not.
>
> Okay, so your view differs.
>
>> I am not. Neither should they ask me to write the commit messages they
>> want. They can make *suggestions*, and I can reject them.
>
> Ofcourse you have a right to reject suggestions.  The question at the
> end of the day doesn't change: did you manage to get people to read
> your patch?

No, at the end of the day what matters is: did the users benefit from this?

The answer for this particular patch is no, and it's not my fault.

Show 5 quoted lines

>> When two persons have different ideas, often times both are wrong, and
>> the middle-ground is best, but sometimes a person reaches the
>> middle-ground, and sometimes one person was right from the start.
>
> https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/middle-ground :)

Yeah, but I didn't claim that, I said sometimes one person was right from the start, no middle-ground.

Show 7 quoted lines

>> But when everyone shares the *assumption* that there is never a commit
>> message that is too long, you know the wrestling mat of ideas is
>> rigged. I wonder if I should write a commit message as long as a book
>> chapter for a one-liner, only to prove a point, but I'm honestly
>> afraid that it would be committed as is.
>
> I'm with you, and don't share that assumption.

s/everyone/almost everyone/

Show 16 quoted lines

> I'm not accusing you
> of writing commit messages that don't conform to some "transcendental
> standard" either: I didn't look at your patches in the first place,
> because the simple Signed-off-by: one-liner in the body didn't really
> make me want to read it.
>
>> And remember what started the conversation; do you think a patch with
>> a possibly incomplete commit message should not be merged to pu
>> (proposed updates), shouldn't even be mentioned in the "what's
>> cooking" mail, and thus shouldn't even be considered "cooking"?
>
> It's irrelevant what I think or others think.  The point is that it
> wasn't mentioned.  Now, why wasn't it mentioned?  Is it because Junio
> and the community hate you, and are conspiring against getting your
> code merged?  Or is it because it didn't catch anyone's eye, and Junio
> was waiting for it to happen (as always)?

My abridged version of the story is: because Jeff King pointed to an area of improvement he wasn't even strongly attached to, I agreed to resubmit, Junio saw that, then I changed my mind, Junio probably didn't see that, and then he forgot about it.

Then, since it's taboo to suggest that a concise commit message is fine, a discussion sprung.

> TL;DR version: Your goal in submitting a patch is to sell it to other
> people in the community.

I disagree.

> If enough people like your patch, it gets
> merged (but that is only the second step).  Your goal is not to fix
> problems for some unknown "users", or argue about some "transcendental
> standard".

I disagree.

> Ofcourse the community shares some view about what a patch
> should look like, but you can mould those expectations gradually.

If experience is any guide, doesn't look like that. But I've noticed that after many months that a patch has been sent people realize that it's more important to get the damn issue fixed than to have a hugely verbose commit message...

Cheers.

-- 
Felipe Contreras