Two GCC stories

Posted Jul 5, 2010 14:23 UTC (Mon) by foom (subscriber, #14868)
In reply to: Two GCC stories by shlomif
Parent article: Two GCC stories

Well, GNU encourages all sorts of strange and harmful coding practices. My favorite, which I've written about before: the requirement to omit any sort of useful information from commit messages. http://fuhm.livejournal.com/5850.html

Now, if they had a useful patch review system, that might make it too easy to figure out what a given change did, so, clearly, they can't have that. I mean, you might even be able to easily go backwards from the worthless commit message to an email sent to gcc-patches (which usually *does* include an explanation), and thus divine why the change was made. That would be so clearly a bad idea, I'm not sure why anyone's even thinking about it!

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Two GCC stories

Posted Jul 5, 2010 15:23 UTC (Mon) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link]

The best/worst part of that is the confusingly incoherent explanations for why some people apparently still think that's a good idea.

It seems to boil down to the following: some people don't want to use a revision control system, so they want the log that it could automatically generate to be manually created by a human. The idea of branching and merging is alien so that fact that this necessitates manual changelog merges is irrelevant. They don't want the actual VCS commit log to have any extra information than could be automatically generated because then the log that they don't want or plan to look at would be different to the manually generated log, which might confuse somebody.