On Tue, Jun 06, 2023 at 05:51:09PM +0300, Jarkko Sakkinen wrote: > It's not a "punishment". It's more like that I really have to take the > time to read the prose... The thing about imperative tense is that it was used as a punishment on me once five years ago. I wrote a quite bad commit message and a senior maintainer told me to re-write it properly and I realized that it was true. My commit message was bad. So I wrote a proper commit message. And then he yelled at me, "Can't you follow simple directions and write it in imperative tense like the documentation says? Are you a shithead?" So then I swore I would never talk to him again or to anyone who enforced the imperative tense rule. That has only happened once in the intervening years. I told the maintainer, "Fine. Re-write the commit message however you like and give me Reported-by credit." This was a cheeky response and it made the maintainer enraged. I guess he thought that my boss would force me to fix the bug or something? I felt bad for the Intel developer who had to fix my bug instead because I knew that the maintainer was going to be super angry if he gave me reported-by credit so I had put him in a bind. I almost re-wrote the commit message so that he wouldn't have to deal with that. Maybe this is how mothers feel when they try to take abuse from an angry husband instead of letting their kids suffer. But I am a bad mother and I left. My boss would never have forced me to deal with that. When he left for a different company he said, "Dan, I'm transitioning and XXX is taking over me and I have told him all your weirdness so he is prepared." And it was a huge comfort to me because I know what my weakness are. You people on this thread all seem super nice. And you're right that we should always try to be improve every aspect of our craft. When Jarkko talked about people who write too long commit messages, I thought about one developer in particular who writes too long commit messages. He writes in imperative tense. He takes everything so seriously and he's never seen a rule without following it. His patches are always right. People have told him that his commit messages are bad and too long and those people are right. But they need to shut up. The good things that he does and the bad things that he does are all part of the same package. He can't change and I don't want him to feel anything but welcome. It's hard to be a good kernel developer without being at least slightly obsessive. Both developers and maintainers are that way. And I deal with a lot of people and accomodating maintainers you disagree with is part of the job. So long as everyone is kind to each other. That's the main thing. regards, dan carpenter
