Re: What's cooking in git.git (Aug 2018, #01; Thu, 2)

Brandon Williams <bmwill@google.com> writes:

You are the second one who were negatively affected by Stefan's "summary" that reads a lot more in what I said than what actually was said by me. Stop paying attention to that message, but do go to the original if you want to hear what I actually said.

The mention of "discussion thread on the list is the authoritative" was said in the context where somebody refuted these "cf. <msg>" on a topic and I got an impression that it was done in the belief that doing so for each and every "cf. <msg>" would be enough to exonerate the topic of all the issues. I was explaining that they were not meant to be exhaustive list, but rather are my personal reminder so that I can go back to the thread to recall why I said things like "Waiting for review to conclude", "expecting a reroll", etc.; as I do not need to point at all the review comments that matter for them to serve that purpose, these "cf. <msg>" must not be taken as the "clear these and you are home free" list. To cover all the issues pointed out in the review process, you must go to the original.

"What's cooking" primarily serves two purposes.

 - After list of patches in a topic, I try to summarize what the
   topic is about.  This is to become merge commit message for the
   topic when it is merged to various integration branches, and also
   to become an entry in the release notes.

 - Then an immediate plan like "Will merge to 'next'", etc. for the
   topic is announced, optionally with comments like "cf. <msg>" to
   remind me why I chose to label the topic as such.

The former is outside the topic of this thread, but both are *not* obviously written by everybody; the former is my attempt to summarize, and people are welcome to improve them. If my attempted summary is way incorrect, that might be an indication that the topic, especially its log messages, is not clearly done.

If my immediate plan contradicts the list concensus, it likely is an indication that I missed the discussion, and it is very much appreciated for those involved in the discussion to correct me. That may result in my dropping a "cf. <msg>" when an issue I thought to be blocking (or to require the topic to be fast-tracked) turns out to have been resolved already, or adding another one when it is pointed out to me that I missed an important issue to block (or fast-track) the topic.

Hope this clarifies a bit of the confusion caused by that summary.