On Tue Jun 6, 2023 at 6:25 PM EEST, Dan Carpenter wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 06, 2023 at 05:51:09PM +0300, Jarkko Sakkinen wrote:
> > On Tue Jun 6, 2023 at 4:38 PM EEST, Dan Carpenter wrote:
> > > On Tue, Jun 06, 2023 at 07:28:52PM +0700, Bagas Sanjaya wrote:
> > > > On Fri, Jun 02, 2023 at 10:59:02AM +0200, Franziska Naepelt wrote:
> > > > > The following issues are fixed:
> > > > > - WARNING: Missing or malformed SPDX-License-Identifier tag
> > > > > - ERROR: trailing statements should be on next line
> > > > > - WARNING: braces {} are not necessary for single statement blocks
> > > > > - ERROR: space required before the open parenthesis '('
> > > > > - ERROR: code indent should use tabs where possible
> > > > > - WARNING: please, no spaces at the start of a line
> > > > > - WARNING: Missing a blank line after declarations
> > > >
> > > > Again, write the patch description in imperative mood (e.g. "Do foo").
> > > >
> > >
> > > Why do you care about imperative tense? Imperative tense doesn't
> > > matter. What matters is that you can understand the issue and how it
> > > looks like to the user. I was working with a group of foreign students
> > > and it was painful to see the contortions that they went through to make
> > > a commit message imperative. It's like saying "Bake a cake", "Ok, now
> > > bake it while juggling." The cake ends up worse. And the commit
> > > message end up worse when we force nonsense rules like this.
> >
> > How about a simple and stupid reason?
> >
> > Usually I write commit message without caring about this. Then I rewrite
> > the commit message and 9/10 it gets shorter. Based on empirical
> > experience, imperative form has minimum amount of extra words.
> >
>
> I'm looking through the git log to see if it's true the imperative tense
> commit message are shorter and better and neither one of those things is
> obvious to me.
>
> This patch had an imperative subject already so it was already kind of
> imperative. Does every sentence have to be imperative or can you just
> add a "Fix it." to the end?
>
> I don't want to belittle the challenges you face around the English
> language but I think students were less fluent than you are. So maybe
> imperative tense works for you but it definitely made their commit
> messages far worse.
Yeah, I was not trying to oppose, just reasoning why I like it more.
For a single patch, this does not really matter anyway :-)
BR, Jarkko
