Programming

17313 readers

678 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

185

Git grumpy: Torvalds complains of passive voice in merge commit messages (www.neowin.net)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

52 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Linus Torvalds expressed frustration over the use of passive voice in merge commit messages, preferring active and imperative language instead.

He provided an example of how commit messages should be rewritten for clarity and consistency across the project.

Torvalds noted that while it's not a major issue, it does add extra work when he has to rewrite messages to match his preference.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] olafurp 2 points 1 month ago

I always thought of the "how" being better explained by the code itself where you can see string.replace(" ", "\ ") as the actual fix while the message says the "why".

I would still have "Fix a bug where strings containing whitespace break CSVExporter" as my go to message.

I guess our viewpoints are different based whether we want the commit messages to represent tasks or changes. They both have their uses of course. Looking at changes to a file to know what people have done to it is better with a "changes" type message but looking at the history to check "did we actually complete this or was it just marked as completed in the issue tracker?" is better with a task based message.

Task management where every issue is put on a ticket and tracked would my type of messages obsolete but at my current company theyre very useful.