Re: How can we decrease the cognitive overhead for contributors?

[Giovanni Biscuolo <g@xelera.eu>]

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Hello Katherine,

Katherine Cox-Buday <cox.katherine.e@gmail.com> writes:

[...]

> By "standard" I mean the GNU Changelog format
> (https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#Change-Logs). As
> in: it's expected that commit messages use this format.

[...]

> In my response I was trying to point out a flaw in your comparison: that 
> with style guidelines, which are also complicated, there is usually a 
> formatter that will do it for me, or a linter that will tell me that 
> something is not meeting the standard. This is because languages have 
> grammars, and linters have higher-order system grammars.

AFAIU you are talking about the "Formatting Code" /subset/ of a "Coding
style", because there is no linter that will tell you if you are
following the subset called "Data Types and Pattern Matching" [1]: am I
wrong?

Back to the git commit message formatting: please can you provide us
with one or two examples of how a commit message should be formatted and
what linter is available for that syntax?

[...]

> Here is my channel with things I intend to upstream, but haven't,
> largely because of this friction.

By "this friction" you mean you miss a linter for commit messages?

Or do you mean you do not agree with the style requested by Guix (and
GNU) for the commit messages?

You are obviously free not to contribute your patches upstream but the
fact that you decided not to because it's "too hard" (my executive
summary about your complaints about Change Log content rules) to write
commit messages suitable for contribution it _not_ a Guix maintainers
fault, not at all.

Obviously everyone is free to comment, ask for clarifications or
proposing **patches**, but it's not fair to say "I'm not contributing
largerly because I've a specific friction with the rules about commit
messages" (again, my executive summary).

[...]

Ciao, Gio'


[1] https://guix.gnu.org/en/manual/devel/en/html_node/Data-Types-and-Pattern-Matching.html

-- 
Giovanni Biscuolo

Xelera IT Infrastructures

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