No. People don't read commit logs for fun. They read them to try to find the source of a bug or who changed a line last and what they thought they were doing.
This breaks that functionality in two ways:
1. Recognizing the joke takes attention, which therefore means I have less attention available to track the thing I'm really hunting. The thing I'm hunting may take a lot of "state info" in my brain so I need that concentration. A commit log of "fix typo" can be quickly ignored without interrupting my brain state.
2. The commit log is not self-explainatory. You have to look at the diff to understand the joke. The whole point of a commit log is to summarize the change so I don't need to look at the diffs unless the commit is related to the functionality I'm investigating.
"Fix typo" followed by the joke would have been acceptable.
Sometime's I feel like I'm the only person who understands code. Seriously, I don't look at comments, api docs, or commit logs unless I am unsure what the diff or code is telling me. I mean, joking with something this trivial is not really a big deal. There is no hidden motivation to change it, no hard to follow changes, no clever bits of code that are subtly altered. An output string is now without a typo. Big whoop.
The only complaint that makes sense is "it's not that funny".
You're not "the only person who understands code", you're the person who refuses to write good documentation based on a misplaced sense of superiority.
Have you read the original article? It was a minor correction to a typo in some documentation. I'm pretty sure everyone who knows how to read English would have understood the diff without reading any comments. The amusing comment was no big deal in this case, IMO.
Situations differ. Absolute rules for all circumstances are far more of a cancer than a little levity.
You've seen my pull requests then? When I write code for work or anyone but me I make sure it's well done. Just because I don't like it doesn't mean I don't do it.
So quit with the negative bullshit attitude and realize that you haven't a clue about what you're saying.
Also note it isn't superior nothing. I'm just genuinely baffled that people are so hesitant about looking at code for a solution. No mater how good the dox I don't understand til I've read the code. Also note how in my linked example residing the docs was way less useful than just looking at the code. Not because the marionette ppl are the evil dancer you whine about but because they are ppl and sometimes things slip
> I'm just genuinely baffled that people are so hesitant about looking at code for a solution. No mater how good the dox I don't understand til I've read the code.
Let me help.
The code you look at to find the solution might be one 20 or 30 line chunk of Ruby that performs a service for a chunk of 10 year old VB or 20 year old Perl or 30 year old C, or some chain of several languages. A support guy, or apps-level documenter, or maintenance programmer adding a feature, or architect integrating with another system, or business integration consultant helping to decide where the business needs to invest, or some other decision maker really, really doesn't have time to read through 40,000 lines of code in several languages to find out how a feature works.
For example: one of my first jobs was with an established big brand with many years of legacy data and organic "enterprise" systems, integrating data produced by an AS400 green-screen application into VB (on a Windows box) by copying (via FTP on a SCO box) a fixed-width text file produced by a shell script on the AS400, and parsing it so we could put it into Oracle for processing by a C++ application with API hooks into a Nortel Meridian coms system. When an outbound call goes to the wrong number, where's the bug?
Even if I'm reading _my own_ code 6 or 36 months later, I'm much happier if I've logged the checkins correctly so that it narrows it down to which dozen or so of many thousands of commits touched a feature. Whenever I've had to track down someone else's bug, or tried to justify the technical justification for some business decision the system makes, or tried to write high level progress documentation (think changelog for senior managers), the commit messages make the difference between it taking two weeks and taking two years (i.e. never happening).
It's easy to think, in the post-codial glow when you're fresh from the zone, that there's no way this code isn't absolutely obvious. I've been that guy. I've also been the guy that cursed that guy for making it hard to find the needle in the haystack. I've even been both guys separated by 18 months. Commit messages can make the difference between getting it done in 20 minutes, and "looking at code for a solution" for two days.
I agree with that. Even more, I think all the documentation people should start being chastised for not providing a decent picture of two. I am a picture thinker, and code translates well to and from pictures for me. Not so much with the documentation. By analogy: I'm sure I could get an understanding of a city with written instructions on geting from various parts to other various parts. I'd do better just wandering around. However give me a map and I know it well pretty quick, especially if I can wander around with the map. Likewise with code, give me a single decent architecture or dataflow diagram and you've helped me more than a whole well written book about the codebase.
Couldn't agree more. I'll also be the first to admit though that some commit messages I've sent off after particularly infuriating bugs have had language that my mother would slap me for (and not very helpful, to boot). We're only human
I don't know. The writing is okay, there weren't any spelling mistakes that I noticed, but the use of three words written in only capital letters was somewhat disconcerting. I'd say if the author wants to get it accepted for publication somewhere reasonably mainstream he's going to need someone else working at arm's length who is willing to take the time to go through it and highlight areas for revision and expansion before sending it back to him. The author and this person might need to repeat the process a few times.
Subsides -> subsists. Not strictly spelling, but definitely a mistake...
Otherwise a pretty awesome commit message. Better than my personal most used (before work moved to git and let me rewrite local history): "oops, forgot to add the new file" and "oops, fix up the bloody test"...
Yup, I realized the typo this morning. Hanging my head in shame. In fairness, this message was written at 4am after working for 18 hours straight (and 63 of the previous 84 hours, according to rescuetime).
In terms of git features, I think I value correcting embarrassing typos in my commit messages higher than fixing typos in my code! They're a lot more frequent due to the fast and loose typing, and lack of a compiler on my back.
Have you run into "git commit --amend"? It will let you alter the most recent commit. Could be useful for times when you've forgotten to add a file before committing. (You maybe shouldn't use it if you've pushed, though.)
It's a terrible commit message, but for the case it was fixing, seriously, why care? If I found it in something I was working on, I'd laugh and move on with my life.
I enjoyed it despite its failure to describe the changeset. More good than harm. I was glad he did it.
The author subtly called out each WordPress core team member in the text with personal attributes and inside jokes. Even without that context, a person could enjoy it.
The English word "apron", as I understand it, used to be "napron". "A napron" eventually shifted to "an apron". See http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Napron.
This indeed is an issue of extreme importance. I'm afraid only Linus Torvalds is qualified to pass a judgement on the quality of this commit message. Fortunately, he isn't quick to judge: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-56599... ;)
It is a joke, but one of the best commit message I've seen lately is from PostgreSQL - for example from Tom Lane - where each bug, or new feature is explained well. I wish I can write such. My commit messages are terrible to my home projects, at least at work I'm following some established rules and it's easier there...
Sure, it's great! It's somewhat funny and really long.
It will take up lots of time for those dumb enough to try to find bugs by reading commit messages rather than use a the proper tool for the job which would of course be: git/svn bisect.
This breaks that functionality in two ways:
1. Recognizing the joke takes attention, which therefore means I have less attention available to track the thing I'm really hunting. The thing I'm hunting may take a lot of "state info" in my brain so I need that concentration. A commit log of "fix typo" can be quickly ignored without interrupting my brain state.
2. The commit log is not self-explainatory. You have to look at the diff to understand the joke. The whole point of a commit log is to summarize the change so I don't need to look at the diffs unless the commit is related to the functionality I'm investigating.
"Fix typo" followed by the joke would have been acceptable.