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

From: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 18, 2013, 03:59 UTC
Message-ID: <CAMP44s0q4k+bjQDhWAiYoj2P+7PJqFRs9s0arhy+F7YDO50dZg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7vsj2od841.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 6:56 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 14 quoted lines

> Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> And how do you know this will be part of the 1%? You don't. How many
>> times have you tracked regressions in transport helper's import/export
>> functionality? How many times in remote-hg? How many times has
>> *anybody* done so?
>
> The last point makes it all the more important to have a good
> history [*1*]. An area that no developer rarely touches with a little
> user base can stay dormant for a long time, and when people do need
> to hunt for an ancient bug or to enhance the existing feature to
> support a new use case without breaking the old use case, the
> original author may not be around, lost interest, or no longer uses
> his own creation.

You are going in circles, I said such situation was *HYPOTHETICAL*, Phil Hord said it wasn't, and now you are bringing back more hypothetical examples, which I would gladly address, as soon as you accept they are HYPOTHETICAL.

Now, how about you answer the questions about the *REAL* situations Phil Hord mentioned?

* How many times have you tracked regressions in transport helper's
import/export functionality?

Hint: zero.

* How many times in remote-hg?

Hint: zero.

* How many times has *anybody* done so?

Hint: other than me, quite possibly zero.

And then, before we consider this *hypothetical* situation, it might be worth noticing what commit this hypothetical person would hit if you do *not* apply this patch, and what the commit message says:

--- remote-helpers: add support for an export command

Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
---

Yeah, well, glad you didn't apply my patch, wouldn't want to mess up the code that was clearly explained by that commit message.

And before you rationalize the above commit, because maybe the functionality was described in the documentation, it wasn't:

 transport-helper.c | 132
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-----------
 1 file changed, 120 insertions(+), 12 deletions(-)

If you do apply my patch, it turns out even the shortest version of my commit message already gives more information to this *hypothetical* developer person.

Show 11 quoted lines

> [Footnote]
>
> *1* In this message, I am not judging if the depth of your writing
>     for the particular change is deep enough. It depends on how well
>     the reader knows the area, and there is no single right answer
>     to that question.
>
>     Incidentally that is why we tend to err on the more descriptive
>     side. The next person your commit will help may not know the
>     area as well as you do and has to figure things out on his
>     own. You are helping him by being descriptive.

I partially agree with this, but I think documenting the nuts and bolts of transport-helper would be better in done in code, documentation, tests, and mailing list analysis. And in all those respects, I believe I've done a more than adequate job.

Cheers.

-- 
Felipe Contreras