[FFmpeg-cvslog] r14267 - trunk/libavcodec/ra288.c

[Diego Biurrun]

On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 12:35:55PM +0200, Vitor Sessak wrote:
> Diego Biurrun wrote:
> > On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 01:38:43AM +0200, Vitor Sessak wrote:
> >> Diego Biurrun wrote:
> >>> On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 12:42:23AM +0200, vitor wrote:
> >>>> Log:
> >>>> Simplify
> >>> Can we *please* have more descriptive commit messages?  How long can it
> >>> take you to explain *what* you simplified?
> >> For such obvious cleanups I'm against spending more time thinking about 
> >> the commit message than doing the code changes (even more so as what is 
> >> "cleaner" is a matter of taste, so it is non trivial to explain why the 
> >> new code is better in a commit msg). But if you could suggest anything 
> >> better that I could copy-paste for those kind of clean-up commits, I'd 
> >> happily do so.
> > 
> > As a rule of thumb:
> > 
> > - Never ever use one-word commit messages,
> 
> "Misc cosmetics" instead of "Cosmetics"?

  cosmetics: Reformat PPC code in libavcodec according to style guidelines.
  This includes indentation changes, comment reformatting, consistent
  brace placement and some prettyprinting.

I was happy with that commit message.

> > - at least mention which function you simplified.
> 
> That I'm not against. Are you ok with something like "Minor/Major 
> simplification in decode()"?

I take what I get.  This would be infinitely better than what you
currently write, so please do it.  Fixing past messages would be a
plus :)

> > How hard can that be?  And how much extra time will that cost you?  10
> > seconds?  30 seconds?  You make it sound almost as if you would gladly
> > skip commenting your code if it would make you save time...
> > 
> >> -Vitor, who didn't want to engage in this flamewar...
> > 
> > Writing bad commit messages is not the way to avoid the flames,
> > obviously...
> 
> I'm all for good commit messages (and that includes having good spelling 
> and punctuation). I just think that "Simplify" and "Cosmetics" are not 
> so bad just because they are one-word.

They are bad because they are non-descriptive.  If you discover a
problem in a big file with a lot of functions and all the log messages
just say "simplify" or "cosmetics", then you will have to check all
commits to see if they introduced the problem.

If, on the other hand, you notice an issue in function foo() and two
commit messages mention that function, then you can probably pinpoint
the problem quickly.

Commit messages consisting of a single word can never be descriptive.

Diego