Re: [PATCH] upgrading-checklist in present tense?
Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:
> A tiny nitpick: I found it jarring when the upgrading-checklist switched
> from past tense to present tense. I suppose it is because I kept
> finding myself switching context when reading it: unlike a changelog,
> which paraphrases a patch that will command the code to change, the
> upgrading checklist is directed to a packager that wants to know what
> has happened in the world.
> How about something like this patch? It tries to give a little more
> detail about what changed in the style of a newscast while at it.
The probable reason why it switched like that is that I standardized on
present tense for the changelogs of all other software packages I
maintain. So insofar as I'm the one who writes a lot of the
upgrading-checklist entries, I'm probably going to keep messing up past
tense, since I'm going to forget that it's different than everything else.
Looking back at older entries, the ones I wrote for previous releases are
also in present tense. Could we standardize in that direction instead? I
have no good reason for that other than it would just be one less thing I
have to try to remember.
Alternately, if we're going to standardize on past tense, we should
probably go ahead and fix everything back to 3.8.0 or so, which seems to
be when I started introducing present tense. (It looks like Manoj was
using past tense.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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