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Well there's two things there. One is commit discipline. People care more or they care less, no tool can truly change that. The other is how we collect inform
by jacques_chester 7y ago
Well there's two things there.
One is commit discipline. People care more or they care less, no tool can truly change that.
The other is how we collect information. I'm not convinced that version control systems are the right place for that, but I know others have explored it (eg. Fossil SCM). Github provides what is a de facto data store for a lot of such annotations through their APIs, I imagine Gitlab does similar.
- hinkley 7y agoCommit discipline is a wider issue, but building and relying on tools that require humans to never make an error does not scale. People always screw up their commit messages. And once they do it they stop trying because if you can't be perfect you're just torturing yourself to try. If there's a way to fix them after the fact you can begin demanding that people have more commit discipline and make them go back and fix it if they don't get it right the first time. I take it as a matter of Broken Window syndrome. You can try to keep them from getting broken but at some point you have to have a way to fix the ones that break.
- jacques_chester 7y agoI didn't mean to give the impression that I don't think better tools are needed, I do. I feel that automation is a gift: what gets automated gets done. Tools create paradigms of working. What I was driving at was that better tools are one part of the triad of people, tools and ways that people work together with tools. Commit discipline will always be desirable, because no tool can recover a snapshot of my mind at the time I made the commit.