Re: Darcs and git: plan of action

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Apr 19, 2005, 14:55 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0504190749030.19286@ppc970.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <20050419104252.GA28269@abridgegame.org>

On Tue, 19 Apr 2005, David Roundy wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> 
> Would a small amount of human-readable change information be acceptable in
> the free-form comment area? In the rename thread I got the impression this
> would be okay for renames.  For example,
> 
> rename foo bar

Sure. That's human-readable and meaningful, as in "it actually makes sense as a commit comment regardless of any darcs issues". As does:

> replace [_a-zA-Z0-9] old_variable new_variable file/path

which is almost so (a human would have written "rename old to new", but the above isn't _that_ different).

HOWEVER, then the requirement would be that we'd never have complex combinations of the above. Ie having 2-5 lines of something like that is "human-readable". Having 10+ lines of the above is not. See?

I have this suspicion that the "replace" thing often ends up being done on dozens of files, and I don't want to have dozens of lines of stuff that ends up really being machine-readable. But if it's ok to depend on the content changes (you _do_ see which files changed) together with a single line of "replace [token-def] xxx yyy", then hell yes - I consider that to be useful information even outside of git.

(In other words: if it looks like something a careful human _could_ have written, it's certainly ok. But if it looks like something a careful human would have used a script to generate 40 entries of, it's bad).

		Linus