On Sun, Sep 8, 2013 at 10:21 AM, René Scharfe <l.s.r@xxxxxx> wrote: > Am 31.08.2013 19:20, schrieb Felipe Contreras: > >> A summary should contain as much information that would allow me to >> skip the commit message as possible. >> >> If I can't tell from the summary if I can safely skip the commit >> message, the summary is not doing a good job. >> >> "trivial simplification" explains the "what", and the "why" at the >> same time, and allows most people to skip the commit message, thus is >> a good summary. > > > No patch should be skipped on the mailing list. As you wrote, trivial > patches can still be wrong. What patches each persons skips is each person's own decision, don't be patronizing, if I want to skip a trivial patch, I will, I can't read each and every patch from the dozens of mailing lists I'm subscribed to, and there's no way each and every reader is going to read each and every patch. They should be prioritized, and trivial ones can be safely skipped by most people. Here's a good example from a simple summary that I didn't write: t2024: Fix inconsequential typos http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/234038 Do I have to read this patch? No. I know it's inconsequential, I can safely skip it, the key word being *I*. *Somebody* should read it, sure, and I'm sure at least Junio would, but I don't need to. > When going through the history I can see that quickly recognizing > insubstantial changes is useful, but if I see a summary twice then in my > mind forms a big question mark -- why did the same thing had to be done yet > again? > > As an example, both 0d12e59f (pull: replace unnecessary sed invocation) and > bc2bbc45 (pull, rebase: simplify to use die()) could arguably have had the > summary "trivial simplification", but I'm glad the author went with > something a bit more specific. Well I wont. Because it takes long to read, and after reading I still don't don't if they are trivial or not, I might actually have to read the commit message, but to be honest, I would probably go right into the diff itself, because judging from Git's history, chances are that somebody wrote a novel there with the important bit I'm looking for just at the end, to don't ruin the suspense. In the first commit, it's saying it's a single invocation, so I take it it's trivial, but what is it replaced with? Is the code simpler, is it more complex? I don't know, I'm still not being told *why* that patch is made. It says 'unnecessary' but why is it unnecessary? In the second commit, it's saying it's a simplification, but I don't know if it's just one instance, or a thousand, so I don't know what would be the impact of the patch. Either way I'm forced to read more just to know if it was safe for me to skip them, at which point the whole purpose of a summary is defeated. >> Again, triviality and correctness are two separate different things. >> The patch is trivial even if you can't judge it's correctness. > > Well, in terms of impact I agree. No, in all terms. A patch can be: Trivial and correct Trivial and incorrect Non-trivial and correct Non-trivial and incorrect >> To me, what you are describing is an obvious patch, not a trivial one. >> An obvious patch is so obvious that you can judge it's correctness >> easily by looking at the diff, a trivial one is of little importance. > > That's one definition; I think I had the mathematical notion in mind that > calls proofs trivial which are immediately evident. We are not talking about mathematics, we are talking about the English human language. -- Felipe Contreras -- 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