Re: Header lines of commit messages

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Eli Zaretskii writes:
 > > From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden>
 > >  > Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:
 > >  > 
 > >  > > The header line that summarizes the commit conveys useless
 > >  > > information.
 > > 
 > > I would phrase that "the headline conveys the information that
 > > thinking about this commit is useless to Emacs maintainers."<wink>
 > > Seriously, you've been describing your information overload in other
 > > contexts.
 > 
 > Exactly.  That is why seeing "cherry-pick commit ABCDEF" means I need
 > to read the whole commit message, i.e. waste my time, whereas "[merge]
 > Do not bind obsolete variables." tells it all without any additional
 > effort.

You're missing the point.  Romain and the org-mode community are
responsible for org-mode most of the time, until it becomes Stefan's/
Yidong's baby in the run-up to a release.  Either way, it should not
affect any of the things you are interested in, so you just don't want
to know.  You want your eyes to glide right over "org-mode synch to
git commit ABCDEF" just as it does over "Gnus synch."  Life is too
short to even think about that stuff.  Put it this way: what could
Romain have written there that would cause you to want to read the
whole commit message?

If you really *do* want to know about irrelevant commits, I don't
understand why you find it acceptable that Gnus doesn't rebase its
synchs into the mainline.  After all, Gnus contains message-mode, and
that does affect your life since message-mode is proposed as a
replacement for RMail's composition mode, a replacement you don't yet
consider acceptable.  So what exactly is happening in Gnus is in fact
relevant to you; even I know that.  Why don't you complain about that?
Presumably because *there are too many irrelevant commits* compressed
into those merges, and you are forced to the conclusion that reading
them would be a waste of your time, and a waste of the committer's
time to rebase them onto the mainline.

Well, the org-mode synch is just as irrelevant.

 > > Yes, as a member of the project, it's important to have
 > > some idea of who's active, but the details would just be overload.
 > 
 > Sorry, I'm not following.  I didn't want to see the author of the
 > change, just its essence.

You think you do, but that's just an unproductive habit, as shown by
the fact that you don't have a problem with the Gnus merge messages.

Also, by "who" I mean which subprojects, not which developers.