Re: Fix quilt merge error in acpi-cpufreq.c

Ingo Molnar
2009-04-16T07:24:37Z

* Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:

> On Thu, 16 Apr 2009, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> >
> > Show me one person _you_ actually taught to write good
> > changelogs - just one person who was not a natural born talker
> > to begin with. I'll show you a 100 other people who cannot write
> > good commit logs. They'll try and will limp along, but generally
> > they cannot.
> >
> > They might not even have English as their mother tongue - but
> > still can read and understand C fantastically.
>
> So?
>
> The fix for that is not to write crap English. The fix for that is
> to help them, and/or just fix their comments for them.
>
> I really don't see the point of your argument. "People don't
> always write good and complete sentences" is _not_ an argument for
> then making that a standard.
>
> Just fix things up. Edit their emails. I do. Andrew does. Yes, and
> despite that some commits will still have odd grammar or otherwise
> not be the great novel of the century, and that's not the point.
> But we should _improve_ on the language for people who aren't
> native English speakers, not devolve it to something weaker.

I too end up editing the language and typography non-trivially for
about 90% of all patches i apply, so there is certainly no lack of
effort here either.

Moving the impact line to the tags section certainly sounds like a
good solution to make the main flow of the commit be natural
language - while still keeping most of the good aspects of the tag
for those who want to use them.

So if that variant now has the official penguin-pee on it, i'd like
to move back to maintaining^W editing commits! :)

Note: today is a flag day when i'll flip over to putting the
impact-tag to the tail section - you'll still see impact lines at
the head of the commit for already committed bits. They might thus
show up in the next merge window or even later (if a topic needs
more work than that).

Thanks,

Ingo