On Fri, Jul 23, 2021 at 1:34 PM Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Emily Shaffer wrote: > > On Fri, Jul 16, 2021 at 10:58:34AM +0200, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote: > > > At this point I tihnk it would be way better to squash this and other > > > such changes that basically add a field to a struct that isn't used yet > > > into whatever commit use/need them. > > > > I think at this point we run into you and me having different > > patch-storytelling styles - which probably is what led to the big topic > > restart in the first place ;) > > Yes, but as a reader of the story I prefer not to have to read the > entire thing in order to understand it. I prefer each page to tell a > small story. > > Putting my armchair reviewer hat I cannot do that for this particular > patch, I would need to do more work to make sense of it, and while I'm > writing this message to explains that, others will simply skip it, and > that's a lost opportunity. Implicit in what Felipe and Ævar are saying is that a well-structured patch series asks the reviewer to keep only one or two details in mind after reading a patch in order to understand the next patch in the series, and that the reviewer shouldn't be expected to keep a large set of details in mind over several patches. Unlike the author of the patches who can keep all the details in mind at once and understands the series in its entirety, reviewers (usually) don't have such luxury[1]. So, it's important to hand-hold reviewers as much as possible by not asking them to remember a lot of details between patches and by ensuring that the details which they must remember only need to be remembered for a very short time. This is why it is helpful, for instance, to bundle documentation and test updates in the patch with changes to code, so the reviewer can see at a glance that the changes to documentation and tests match the changes to the code, rather than delaying documentation and test updates until later in the series. [1]: If you've ever read a novel in which the author has multiple story lines running and switches between story lines infrequently, such that when the author switches back to story-line "A", which you last saw 100 pages ago, and you can't remember what was going in "A" or even who the minor characters are anymore, so that you have to go back and reread 10 or 20 pages from the previous time you saw "A", then that's representative of the difficulty reviewers can experience when reading a patch series, except with a patch series, the cognitive load is already quite high. (Very nice run-on sentence I just wrote.)
