Re: git bikeshedding (Re: triggers in dpkg, and dpkg maintenance)
On Fri, 29 Feb 2008, Mike Bird wrote:
> I'm not a DD but I've been programming since 1963 when I was 7.
> Based on decades of software engineering experience, I would
> just like to remind you to USE THE FSCKING SOURCE!!!
I am not sure this applies to dpkg, but in kernel land, the full reasoning
behind even one-line trivial patches to some deep-magic areas are just plain
impossible to understand without a ton of explanations in the log.
> Logs are not the source. No matter how much time you waste
> fiddling with them, they are really unimportant. Programmers
Sorry, I don't agree with you. Logs are important. Especially if one
member of the team quits, and another has to join in and find out exactly
what was happening to the code at that point in time (as opposed to reading
the code at that point in time, to know how it looked like).
> should be documented in a design document or noted in a comment.
Comments have this very bad property of getting stale, which really is a
damn pity, as comments are in the code and therefore extremely more likely
to be read by someone trying to modify that area of the code.
Logs are never stale, as they are only valid at one exact point in time and
they are tied to a specific set of changes anyway. But they don't have the
extreme advantage of locality that comments do. You need *both*, and you
need to take good care of *both*.
> Time spent prettifying logs is time that could be better spent
> programming or packaging or playing with the grandkids.
That does not work well in large development teams.
--
"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
Henrique Holschuh
Reply to: