Greg Stein <gstein@lyra.org> writes:
> I'd like to ask that we use it for the simple case of being able to do a
> "grep" on "Submitted by" to find *all* the people who have submitted changes
> to SVN. This would allow us to gather up people for some kind of credits or
> thanks.
Hmm, I've thought about this a bit more, and kind of think it might
just be Yet Another force pulling log messages away from readability.
"Submitted by" is not always an accurate way to thank someone for
their work. Sometimes someone reviewed code; sometimes they pointed
out a single bug in passing; sometimes they wrote whole functions that
someone else then tweaked and massaged. There's a continuum of
involvement here, and I find I often can't capture it in automatable
conventions ("Submitted by", "Reviewed by", etc) as accurately as in
English prose.
If automatic grepping were a real solution to the mechanical task of
crediting people, then it might still be worth it. But in practice,
making sure we've got every name isn't the hard part -- even just
grepping the log for "@" would do it. The time consuming part in
preparing credits is the non-automatable part: figuring out who did
what (using all the investigative tools at one's disposal, including
human memory), and then writing it up. I don't mean to say it's an
unwelcome task -- I'm really looking forward to doing it for
Subversion, and there sure are a lot of names! :-)
But I get the feeling that trying to stick with this convention for
all contributions will just force people into writing either
convoluted or inaccurate log messages.
Thoughts? Am I just thinking about this too hard? :-) Heh...
-K
Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:25 2006