> It troubles me that Chesterton charges the man who would tear down the fence with a duty: "Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that yo

> It troubles me that Chesterton charges the man who would tear down the fence with a duty: "Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it." ...When we contemplate changing the rules of society, the archive needs to contain more than just the justification of the new rules, analogous to the purpose of the fence. The defeated opposition must also have their place in the records. I don't think those are mutually exclusive. As a maintainer, I insist that commit messages which fix things contain loads of information about the problem they're fixing; and in my own commit messages I often include references to other possible approaches and why this one was chosen, to make the "Chesterton's Fence" challenge easier to deal with. But if you find a bit of code doing something that looks unnecessarily conservative, and the original commit message from 10 years ago doesn't explain why, it's still a risk to remove the checks; and it's still right to insist that an attempt be made to go back and find out why things were done that way in the first place. In a sense, the second is the reason I do the first. The pain of trying to reconstruct from 10-year-old email conversations the purpose of a given line of code is what motivates me to insist that commit messages contain all that information in the first place. Similarly, the difficulty of going back to find out why a law was enacted in the first place should be a motivation for people to insist that we store that information for the future.