Re: AMD guys: commit messages?

["Christian König" <deathsimple@vodafone.de>]

On 08.12.2015 15:04, Ilia Mirkin wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 8, 2015 at 8:43 AM, Ernst Sjöstrand <ernstp@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hello list!
>>
>> I lurk here and try to follow Mesa/DRI and most specifically Radeon
>> driver development, report bugs, test new stuff and help get the bugs
>> closed and so on...
>>
>> However I see that the commit messages for AMD/Radeon are often very
>> unhelpful. They don't state the motivation behind the commits. Is this
>> a optimization, a nice-to-have cleanup or does this actually fix
>> something? What does this fix?
>> Are there tests or bugreports related?
>>
>> Improving this could make it easier for new developers to start
>> contributing in the long run also!
>>
>> Examples:
>>
>> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/?id=d5a5dbd71f0e8756494809025ba2119efdf26373
>> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/?id=338d7bf0531a10d90db75ad333f7e0a31693641f
>> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/?id=4ebcf5194d98b47bd9e8a72b7418054708b14750
>>
>> This is also in the mesa dev guidelines, www.mesa3d.org/devinfo.html :
>> "Patch fix is not clearly described. For example, a commit message of
>> only a single line, no description of the bug, no mention of bugzilla,
>> etc."
> So... what's the appropriate amount? Have every commit describe, in
> detail, how the GPU works, how the driver works, and what little bit
> of interaction is being changed? I'm not an AMD developer (I do hack
> on nouveau though), but I basically get what all 3 of the above are
> doing. The reason why you're having trouble is probably because you
> don't know what the ingredients are -- what's a mip level, what's a
> ring index, what's fence, what's a winsys, what's a "emit vertex", all
> in the context of the relevant drivers. If you know what all these
> things are, the above commits become much clearer. But having to
> describe each of those things every time would ... not fly :)

Yeah, exactly.

I work for AMD but mostly on the kernel side and I wasn't involved in 
any of those patches, nor with the surrounding source code.

But I do get just by reading the subject lines what all of those are about.

So it's more about knowing the driver and the hardware a bit to 
understand what's going on here.

While it often could be a bit more, describing everything in the commit 
message is way to much.

Regards,
Christian.

>
> You can usually tell a cleanup/hypothetical fix apart from a real fix
> by seeing if it (a) references a bugzilla, (b) mentions a commit it
> fixes, or (c) cc'd to stable.
>
>    -ilia
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