On Sun, Jun 09, 2013 at 12:53:38PM -0500, Felipe Contreras wrote: > On Sun, Jun 9, 2013 at 12:37 PM, John Keeping <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Sun, Jun 09, 2013 at 07:33:42PM +0200, SZEDER Gábor wrote: > >> On Sun, Jun 09, 2013 at 12:23:01PM -0500, Felipe Contreras wrote: > >> > On Sun, Jun 9, 2013 at 12:18 PM, SZEDER Gábor <szeder@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> > > On Sun, Jun 09, 2013 at 11:40:22AM -0500, Felipe Contreras wrote: > >> > >> We should free objects before leaving. > >> > >> > >> > >> Signed-off-by: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@xxxxxxxxx> > >> > > > >> > > A shortlog-friendlier subject could be: "sequencer: free objects > >> > > before leaving". > >> > > >> > I already defended my rationale for this succinct commit message: > >> > > >> > http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/225609/focus=225610 > >> > >> Your arguments were unconvincing. The mere fact that I raised this > >> issue unbeknownst to the earlier posting clearly shows that there's > >> demand for descriptive subjects. > > > > Not to mention that with your subject no body is needed, making the > > overall message more succinct. > > It's not succinct at all, because there's no short and quick > description of what the patch actually is; a trivial fix. Is it not equally succinct to say "fix memory leak"? > > When reading a log, as soon as I see "trivial" I become suspicious that > > someone is trying to cover something up, much like "left as an exercise > > for the reader". If the subject says "fix memory leak" then it's > > obvious what the patch is meant to do, and when there is no subtlety to > > be explained (as there isn't in this patch) there is no need for a body. > > You are not a rational person then. The commit message has absolutely > no bearing on the quality of the code. If you are less suspicious of a > commit message that says "fix memory leak", you are being completely > biased. > > Whether the commit message says "fix memory leak", or "trivial fix", > or "foobar", the code might still be doing something wrong, and you > can't decide that until you look at the code. I have a certain level of trust that commit summaries in git.git will be accurate. If I want to know what has changed, then "fix memory leak" implies "no functional change"; if I see "trivial fix" then how do I know what that is? It could be a whitespace change, a fix to a memory leak, a typo correction, a change to a separator in a message shown to the user, or even a small change to corner case behaviour. > If you don't care about the code, but still want to know what the > patch is doing, then you can look at the whole commit message, and "We > should free objects before leaving." explains that perfectly. The short message is what appears in "What's Cooking", why should I need to break out of my mail client to find out what it means? -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html