On Tue, Jan 07, 2025 at 08:37:33AM +0100, Patrick Steinhardt wrote: > On Tue, Jan 07, 2025 at 02:07:52AM -0500, Jeff King wrote: > > We want to know if there are any leaks logged by LSan in the results > > directory, so we run "find" on the containing directory and pipe it to > > xargs. We can accomplish the same thing by just globbing in the shell > > and passing the result to grep, which has a few advantages: > > > > - it's one fewer process to run > > > > - we can glob on the TEST_RESULTS_SAN_FILE pattern, which is what we > > checked at the beginning of the function, and is the same glob use > > s/use/used > > I'm always a bit thrown off by your style of bulleted lists, where they > feel like sentences but start with a lower-case letter, and sometimes > they do and sometimes they don't end with punctuation. Maybe it's just > me not being a native speaker and it's a natural thing to do in English. > In any case, it's nothing that really matters in the end, but would be > happy to learn if this is indeed something you tend to do in English. Heh. Yeah, I've seen you mention them before and I've been tempted to start a big discussion. But I never felt like it was worth it. But tonight's your lucky night. ;) In short: I think it's a style question. I perceive them as continuations of the sentence that has the ":". Though admittedly I do not always grammatically continue that sentence. So for example I could: - have one bullet item that completes the sentence. - and then another that likewise completes it. ;) I think many style guides would frown on that. Especially with the periods at the end (you might argue that they should be semicolons). In the example you quoted above they don't grammatically continue the sentence, so arguably what I'm saying doesn't even apply. But I also kind of think of the list items as sentence fragments. That sometimes happen to make a full sentence. Or need punctuation because that fragments gets so long it contains multiple sentences. I dunno. You asked if it is something you tend to do in English. It is something _I_ tend to do in English, but I think most style guides would suggest against it (but then, most also suggest against bulleted lists in the first place). (They probably also suggest against lots of parentheses). So I wouldn't necessarily copy me. My general feeling is that unless a commit message is inaccurate or hard to understand, we should mostly let it pass (even typos). Yes, they are an artifact that is enshrined in the history. But at some point they are also just a written communication between developers, and we all have our own voices and styles. And make mistakes. Polishing them is something we _can_ do collaboratively, but there are diminishing returns. In case it is not clear, I would not say the same for documentation, error messages, etc. Those are artifacts that hits a wider audience, and we have a tool for polishing them together: git. And people should still proofread and correct their own messages before sending. Believe it or not, I do always take a final pass when sending out my commits and still manage to have errors. ;) A lot of times I end up improving clarity and wording on the final pass, but end up introducing a typo (I'm pretty sure that the use/used above was me switching last-minute between "the same glob we use" and "the same glob used"). Bringing it back to the example at hand, my assumption is that the bullet list capitalization and punctuation is mostly a question of style, and isn't making the result hard to understand. But if it is, I can try to adjust. I actually wrote a bulleted list in a commit message earlier today and capitalized it just for you. :) -Peff
