On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 12:16:28AM +0530, Ramkumar Ramachandra wrote: > John Keeping wrote: > > Ugh, why this roundabout-passive-past tone? Use imperative tone > > like this: > > > > ... > > > > vs. > > > > We normally use the imperative in commit messages, perhaps like > > this? > > > > ... > > > > As my mother would say, "politeness costs nothing" ;-) > > The review is being honest about her feelings in the first one, and > being artificially diplomatic in the second one. I don't think it is artificially diplomatic, it's an attempt to convey a helpful tone in an email. As has been said elsewhere, it is easy to read an email in the wrong tone (there is an oft-cited statistic about the percentage of communication that is non-verbal, and which cannot be inferred from written text). For this reason I think it is important for reviewers to make an effort to minimise the risk that what they write can be interpreted as being aggressive. > Both of them are > constructive and friendly, in that they provide an example for the > submitter to follow. Both provide the same advice, yes. But I disagree that they are both friendly. The top example reads (to me at least) as an attack on the submitter for not knowing better. It may sometimes be necessary to resort to strong wording if someone appears to be wilfully ignoring sensible advice but we should not expect every submitter to know the expectations of the project; the first message to someone should gently guide them in the right direction. > Either way, I'm not interested in problems that have no solutions. > The only "solution" I see here is to suffocate every contributor until > they are "tactful enough" for the majority's liking, and "remove" the > ones that don't conform. If you do have an alternate solution, please > share it with us. I don't have a solution, only a hope that regular contributors will learn from others how they can phrase review comments less aggressively. I expect different people will read the same statement differently; people are from different cultures and what is considered acceptable in one culture can be considered rude in another. We should aim to cultivate our own culture where we try to minimise the risk that what we write will be misinterpreted by someone with a different cultural background. -- 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