Re: Header lines of commit messages

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden,
>     address@hidden
> Date: Sun, 27 Jun 2010 02:08:37 +0900
> 
> 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.

You are assuming too much, and/or think about your habits when you
talk about mine.  Please don't decide for me what is relevant and what
isn't.  My interests in Emacs development are more than just bidi and
MS-DOS, you know.  In particular, I happen to be a happy used of the
Org mode, and therefore my interests in what gets committed to the
Emacs repository by Org maintainers are not just theoretical.

In the Gnus case, I'd prefer more meaningful headers as well, but it's
hard to ask for that when a large body of unrelated changes is
delivered to Emacs at once.

More generally, people who commit changes should not ass-u-me too much
when they reason about the importance of clear and concise commit
messages and their summary header lines.  They will never be able to
second-guess the interests of those who will be reading those
messages.  So it is best to format and word them as if the reader were
genuinely interested in the package being modified and privy to its
features.

> Put it this way: what could Romain have written
> there that would cause you to want to read the whole commit message?

I already suggested such a header: "Do not bind obsolete variables."

> 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.

Because I'm too old to fight Quixotic battles.  And because people who
do the job should have some leeway in determining how far they want to
go towards the project to which they contribute.  If Stefan and Yidong
can live with what Gnus maintainers do when they synch, so can I.

> 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?

You again want to decide for me what is interesting.  And now you even
decide what I should complain about.  Please don't.

> 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.

Not this one.  See its ChangeLog entry.  And maybe re-read what I
wrote in this thread, because I already responded to all these
arguments.