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

[brian via "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." <guix-devel@gnu.org>]

pinoaffe <pinoaffe@gmail.com> writes:

> Andreas Enge <andreas@enge.fr> writes:
>> So as far as I am concerned, they are tremendously useful. Well, that may
>> be due to a lack of git knowledge, of course! But while in other projects
>> I often find I need to look at the content of commits, in Guix it is often
>> enough to just look at the changelog.
>
> I also quite like the commit messages, they've allowed me to find things
> that I couldn't have found using `git blame`

There's a trade-off, though. They seem to have their uses for some
people, though it doesn't appear to me to be majority of people, on some
occasions (the relative number of which I can't guess, since I don't use
them at all). However, there's a cost, too. The very existence of them
as a requirement puts at least some people off from submission at all,
it adds to the work of people who still put in the effort to submit
(especially so for people not using Emacs!), it's an extra check for
committers to go through. If the check fails, the patch can get bounced
back for (to me) trivial reasons, or, best case, the committer fixes the
error themselves. But even in the best case, since the commit hash has
now changed, it causes ‘git branch -d’ to issue a warning about unmerged
commits.

I, clearly, do not think the trade-off is worth it.

-bjc