Re: git bikeshedding (Re: triggers in dpkg, and dpkg maintenance)
On Fri February 29 2008 09:26:32 Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> 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.
Irrelevant. The size and complexity of dpkg are not in the same ballpark,
county, state, country, or hemisphere as the kernel.
> > 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).
A log by this measure has temporary value during development of a new
feature. Thereafter the value is negligable. Therefore by this measure
it is not worth spending time prettifying logs for git merges of completed
features.
> > 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*.
You may wish to have both logs and comments but you have not demonstrated
any value to logs other than for WIP, nor any return on the investment of
Ian's time to prettify logs for you.
> > 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.
I confess I've only worked on development teams ranging from one to a
few hundred developers. dpkg has how many thousand developers?
--Mike Bird
Reply to: