Re: git bikeshedding (Re: triggers in dpkg, and dpkg maintenance)
On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 08:22:51AM -0800, Mike Bird wrote:
> On Fri February 29 2008 06:29:07 Otavio Salvador wrote:
> > I personally apply this same policy on repositories that I work and it
> > usually makes much easier logs to read.
>
> 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!!!
>
> Logs are not the source. No matter how much time you waste
> fiddling with them, they are really unimportant. Programmers
> need to see what the code is today. When bisecting a programmer
> may care what the code was yesterday. But no programmer cares
> all that much how some other programmer summarized some past
> state of the code. If there's anything important to know it
> should be documented in a design document or noted in a comment.
> And even those should be taken with a grain of salt.
>
> Time spent prettifying logs is time that could be better spent
> programming or packaging or playing with the grandkids.
X is a 20 year old codebase with most of the little details of the code
lost to the depths of time. We're forced to use the code (or what memory
the older developers still have) for large chunks of the codebase, so I can
empathize very much with what you're saying because it's the most important
way to interact with the code.
But I very much want justification for lots of the details when making
changes and I wish we had a strong history going back those 20 years.
Sortware like dpkg will probably be with us for another 30 years at the
rate we're going. Who're you to say that the history in the logs won't be
important?
- David Nusinow
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