Re: On commit access, patch review, and remaining healthy

[Maxim Cournoyer <maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com>]

Hello,

zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi,
>
> On Sat, 11 Jun 2022 at 01:13, Thiago Jung Bauermann <bauermann@kolabnow.com> wrote:
>
>> But I do think it's one more source of “friction” for new contributors,
>> and one more thing for us to require that they get right.
>
> [...]
>
>> There's one in the GNU Coding Standards¹:
>
> [...]
>
>> Personally, I think nowadays this purpose is better fulfilled by
>> good commit messages and git blame. Especially with an editor that makes
>> it easy to use them to navigate through history (such as Emacs, but
>> certainly others as well).
>
> I agree that Emacs+Magit among many others make easy to navigate through
> the history.  However, the commit messages are probably good enough
> because some Coding Standards are imposed.
>
> Because these standards, it is easy to navigate via grep for instance.
> Git blame is useful once you know exactly what you are looking for.
> Before that, when I try to figure out the logic behind such change, the
> commit messages more or less fixed by the standards are very helpful,
> IMHO.

I agree.  I've come to like GNU ChangeLog commit messages because it
forces me to lay down the changes I've worked on, and sometimes I can
spot things that would be better separated in its own commit, or that
was unintentionally left while testing.

When reviewing others' work it also give me a clear trail of what they
did, and I can match the actual changes to their high level description.

> Whatever the style (ChangeLog or anything else), it appears to me a good
> thing to have strong standards.

Agreed!

Thanks,

Maxim