[...] Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > Elijah Newren wrote: >> Personally, I think that a really important point to keep in mind when >> submitting patch series is trying to figure out the easiest way to >> move the code from point A to point B, not the route you took to get >> from point A to point B. This is especially true for longer patch >> series. It's common after you've finished a series to discover there >> was an easier or cleaner route to follow that would have arrived at >> the same end-point. It's not uncommon for me to spend a significant >> chunk of time rebasing and restructuring a patch series to try to >> highlight such a better path. This includes not just style fixups, >> but different patch orderings, alternate ways to break up functions, >> using different data structures, etc. > > Me as well. > > It's extra work for one person, but everyone else benefits, including > that one person in the future (who usually forgets why he/she did things > in that particular way). > > Cheers. Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > Sergey Organov <sorganov@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > >> When Junio noticed and pointed to this deficiency, I asked him if I >> should fix all the series from the start, or it'd be OK to use fixup >> commit. As he didn't answer and nobody else commented either, I opted >> for the latter. > > Sorry if it slipped through the cracks---I get too many discussion > threads to pay attention to. > > Yes, we strongly prefer *not* to keep the honest history that > records all the mistakes we made along the way. Rather, we take the > time a topic is still in flight and not yet cast in stone by merged > to 'next' as an opportunity to pretend that the topic came to > existence in the perfect shape, thanks to collective brain effort. > > It is our basic courtesy to future developers who has to read our > code (i.e. "log -p") to understand what we've been thinking, when > they want to fix some stupid bugs we will inevitably leave in our > codebase. It is distracting to read from the beginning of a topic, > notice something funny going on and keep moveing to later patches, > while harboring puzzlement in our minds, then later discover that > the funny thing we noticed earlier was a simple mistake that gets > fixed, not some clever trick the reader needs to think deeply to > understand. OK, so I'll do it. I'd like to have some agreement on the final shape of the topic though before I cleanup the series, if possible. Thanks, -- Sergey
