Re: Questionable "cosmetic changes" commits

[Bengt Richter <bokr@bokr.com>]

Hi Christopher and Raghav,

On +2020-12-05 21:54:36 +0000, Christopher Baines wrote:
> 
> Raghav Gururajan <raghavgururajan@disroot.org> writes:
> 
> > Hi Mark!
> >
> >> Meanwhile, you've only provided a rationale for 1 out of 3 of the kinds
> >> of changes made in these commits.
> >> 
> >> Do you have an explanation for why you are removing comments in your
> >> "cosmetic changes" commits? For example, the following two commits
> >> remove comments that explain why 'propagated-inputs' are needed:
> >> 
> >> https://git.sv.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/commit/?id=c3264f9e100ad6aefe5216002b68f3bfdcf6be95
> >> https://git.sv.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/commit/?id=416b1b9f56b514677660b56992cea1c78e00f519
> >> 
> >> What's your rationale for doing this? Am I the only one here who finds
> >> this practice objectionable? It's not even mentioned in the commit logs.
> >
> > I think the comments are useful for non-trivial cases. In these
> > definitions, the inputs were propagated because they were mentioned in
> > .pc files. Propagation because of pkg-config is trivial. So I removed
> > the comments.
>
┌──────────────────────────────┐
│ "So I removed the comments." │
└──────────────────────────────┘
Raghav, I think you may not grok the social signalling of a statement like that :)

It sounds like you are overlooking the _social_ need for consensus
in modifying a shared environment.

Taking a picture off the wall of a shared living room is different
from taking the same picture off the wall in your private room.

A git commit in a jointly developed FLOSS project is modifying a shared living room.
(But do what you like in your own git repo ;-)

The social aspect is not about the technical merits of of your changes,
it's about the difference between joint ownership and private ownership,
and the differences in exercising owner rights.

> In the context of writing Guix packages, propagating the necessary
> inputs to support other packages finding the library via pkg-config is a
> serious thing, not trivial. If it breaks, dependent packages will likely
> change in behaviour or stop building entirely.
> 
> As for the comments, personally, I think the reasons behind propagated
> inputs are individual enough and important enough to each package that
> it's useful to write them down, even if that comment is "these things
> are referenced by the .pc file". That way others looking at the package
> definition don't have to wonder or try and dig through the Git history
> to find information about what's going on.
> 
> Anyway, I think the most useful output from this discussion is amending
> or adding to the packaging guilelines to cover this:
> 
>   https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Packaging-Guidelines.html

-- 
Regards,
Bengt Richter