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I think GitHub has broken us a lot here. Commits, when extracted from the repository, need to stand on their own. Example: sending a commit over email. Then

by seiji 11y ago

I think GitHub has broken us a lot here. Commits, when extracted from the repository, need to stand on their own. Example: sending a commit over email. Then you look at a commit message and you do ask "What does this commit do?" The commit doesn't "removed unnecessary things" because that just sounds wrong—the commit didn't already do things before it existed. The weirdness comes from describing what the author already did to even create the commit versus what someone encounters when they read the commit for the first time. Your historical actions don't matter in writing results, only future readers matter for what they discover the patch will change.

networked 11y ago
A late update on this subthread (I wrote the GP): I found your comment very insightful when I first read it. That the VCS applies a series of patches that are essentially standalone to the initial blank state is something that gets obscured when you use GitHub and similar tools. (And GitHub is a big influence — for me it's a major reason for using Git a lot more than, say, Mercurial or Fossil.) I have since given the matter more thought and have adopted the imperative mood subject line style for a new project I started. As for "addressing the system", I have decided for now to not do it at all in my subject lines to avoid the confusion.
davexunit 11y ago
Agreed. GitHub has really done a lot to harm the quality of commits. Their tools emphasize looking at and commenting on the total diff of the patch set rather than inspecting each commit on its own. I tried commenting on the patches themselves once only to realize that the pull request page didn't show them and they were hard for the author to find. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that GitHub is willing to change their code review tools since even Linus Torvalds complained about them and nothing important was changed.
- seiji 11y ago
  it doesn't seem that GitHub is willing to change their code review tools They only have $350 million in funding. What do you expect, new features? (SpaceX launched rockets into space with $100 million of private Elon Musk money. $350 million from VCs helps GitHub make... webpages.)
- piotrkaminski 11y ago
  Luckily, since GitHub has a pretty extensive API, this leaves the way open for third-party code review solutions like https://reviewable.io https://reviewable.io (disclosure: I built it). But yeah, considering how long it took them just to put in a split view, I wouldn't expect a whole lot of improvements in the foreseeable future...

by seiji 11y ago

networked 11y ago

A late update on this subthread (I wrote the GP): I found your comment very insightful when I first read it. That the VCS applies a series of patches that are essentially standalone to the initial blank state is something that gets obscured when you use GitHub and similar tools. (And GitHub is a big influence — for me it's a major reason for using Git a lot more than, say, Mercurial or Fossil.) I have since given the matter more thought and have adopted the imperative mood subject line style for a new project I started. As for "addressing the system", I have decided for now to not do it at all in my subject lines to avoid the confusion.

davexunit 11y ago

Agreed. GitHub has really done a lot to harm the quality of commits. Their tools emphasize looking at and commenting on the total diff of the patch set rather than inspecting each commit on its own. I tried commenting on the patches themselves once only to realize that the pull request page didn't show them and they were hard for the author to find. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that GitHub is willing to change their code review tools since even Linus Torvalds complained about them and nothing important was changed.

seiji 11y ago
it doesn't seem that GitHub is willing to change their code review tools They only have $350 million in funding. What do you expect, new features? (SpaceX launched rockets into space with $100 million of private Elon Musk money. $350 million from VCs helps GitHub make... webpages.)
piotrkaminski 11y ago
Luckily, since GitHub has a pretty extensive API, this leaves the way open for third-party code review solutions like https://reviewable.io https://reviewable.io (disclosure: I built it). But yeah, considering how long it took them just to put in a split view, I wouldn't expect a whole lot of improvements in the foreseeable future...