From: Amaury Pouly <amaury.pouly_at_gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2010 17:28:45 +0200

On 15 September 2010 23:39, Rafaël Carré <rafael.carre_at_gmail.com> wrote:

> > 2010/9/15 Jonathan Gordon <jdgordy_at_gmail.com>:
> >> When is it read? users only read it when it happens (or soon (<6m)
> >> afterwards ) to see what development they might have missed, probably
> >> looking for keywords of interest to them. Devs (speaking from my
> >> experience here) do the users thing, but when the message is actually
> >> important is when you are trying to track down a possible breaking
> >> change, and even then (as I said a few replies ago) the message isnt
> >> even the first thing I look for.) And then when I find a possible
> >> change I look at the diff before rereading the message (because I know
> >> it cant possibly explain everything).
> >
> > It happens frequently to me that I'm reading the full log of a particular
> file
> > or folder (with or without the diff), and especially when it's an area
> that I
> > don't know.
> >
> > Please think that all your logs can and will be read in years from now
> and
> > any info which could help the future devs to understand the code is nice.
> >
> > It's quite frequent that you are trying to understand why a line of code
> was
> > committed 8 years ago and you wish the committer had explained better
> > what he did. (ok perhaps not very frequent but it did happen to me and
> > other people in different projects)
> >
>
> This is another problem entirely which is impossible to fix unless we
> require commit message reviews. enabling log changing isnt going to
> fix it either (except for when it is blatantly wrong and completely
> accidental). This is no different to trying to write the actual code
> so it is understandable 8 years later. "you" understand it now, and
> "you" will understand it then so whats the big deal, right?
>

You seem to always think about the users but I think you are missing the
point. Developers too want clear commit messages (or at the very least,
several people on this ML have shown interest in good commit messages).
When I sync my repo with the SVN, *I* read the log and hate having to loop
through the list of modified files because the commit is bad or doesn't
mention what is modified. And thinks like "grumble", "woops", "oops", "3rd
time lucky" don't really help. My point is that these messages are a pain
because you can't tell from the log if it touches something you care about
or not. I don't care about everything in rockbox because the codebase is too
big for this but when someone touches something I'm interested in, I prefer
to see it directly from the log.
Notice that my point is not only about "verbosity", it's about saying what
you touch in the code.

But anyway, this thread is going nowhere. Being able to modify the log would
be a good plus, for sure.
Received on 2010-09-15