On 08.12.2015 15:04, Ilia Mirkin wrote:
On Tue, Dec 8, 2015 at 8:43 AM, Ernst Sjöstrand <ernstp@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hello list!
I lurk here and try to follow Mesa/DRI and most specifically Radeon
driver development, report bugs, test new stuff and help get the bugs
closed and so on...
However I see that the commit messages for AMD/Radeon are often very
unhelpful. They don't state the motivation behind the commits. Is this
a optimization, a nice-to-have cleanup or does this actually fix
something? What does this fix?
Are there tests or bugreports related?
Improving this could make it easier for new developers to start
contributing in the long run also!
Examples:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/?id=d5a5dbd71f0e8756494809025ba2119efdf26373
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/?id=338d7bf0531a10d90db75ad333f7e0a31693641f
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/?id=4ebcf5194d98b47bd9e8a72b7418054708b14750
This is also in the mesa dev guidelines, www.mesa3d.org/devinfo.html :
"Patch fix is not clearly described. For example, a commit message of
only a single line, no description of the bug, no mention of bugzilla,
etc."
So... what's the appropriate amount? Have every commit describe, in
detail, how the GPU works, how the driver works, and what little bit
of interaction is being changed? I'm not an AMD developer (I do hack
on nouveau though), but I basically get what all 3 of the above are
doing. The reason why you're having trouble is probably because you
don't know what the ingredients are -- what's a mip level, what's a
ring index, what's fence, what's a winsys, what's a "emit vertex", all
in the context of the relevant drivers. If you know what all these
things are, the above commits become much clearer. But having to
describe each of those things every time would ... not fly :)
Yeah, exactly.
I work for AMD but mostly on the kernel side and I wasn't involved in
any of those patches, nor with the surrounding source code.
But I do get just by reading the subject lines what all of those are about.
So it's more about knowing the driver and the hardware a bit to
understand what's going on here.
While it often could be a bit more, describing everything in the commit
message is way to much.
Regards,
Christian.
You can usually tell a cleanup/hypothetical fix apart from a real fix
by seeing if it (a) references a bugzilla, (b) mentions a commit it
fixes, or (c) cc'd to stable.
-ilia
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