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

> Felipe Contreras wrote:
>> I think the commit message is fine, you don't. So YOU go ahead and
>> write the proper one. If you don't, all you are doing is being an
>> impediment to progress.
>
> Hey Felipe.  Let's get a few things straightened out first:
>
> - We all act in our selfish interests, and write code to scratch our
> personal itches.  I don't write code or commit messages for anyone
> else, and neither should you.
>
> - However, we're not working in isolation.  We have this giant mailing
> list where we all post our patches.  It's like a bazaar where we
> compete against other patches for developer attention and potential
> reviewers.  In other words, it's a free market, and we're selling our
> product: if it fails to sell, will you blame the market or your
> product?  I write clear code and beautiful commit messages exactly for
> this reason: I'm fighting for attention!

> - We have to learn to interoperate with others' code and conventions,
> if we want to be part of the community.  That doesn't mean that we
> drown out our individuality, but it means that a our patch series has
> to conform to some minimal, loose, and evolving standard.  Now, you
> can argue that many of the existing conventions are outdated (I do it
> all the time), but it cannot change overnight.  Your influence on the
> community will show up over an extended period of time.

> - We are not an old enterprise who blame breakages on a few
> individuals, and fire them.  We're a community where all of us are
> equally responsible for all parts of the code.  I am as responsible
> for the remote-hg code in master as you are, as I had every
> opportunity to review it when the patch series came up on the list.  I
> might have chosen not to, but that doesn't relieve me of
> responsibility.

> -  We don't practice division of labour.  There are no managers,
> "testing people", "documentation people", "code-writing people",
> "commit-message writing people" etc.  Everyone has to do some portion
> of all these tasks, although we try to keep the boring work/ technical
> debt to a minimum.  Don't ask other people to write commit messages
> for your code.