Bash 5.0 released

Posted Jan 9, 2019 9:49 UTC (Wed) by zdzichu (guest, #17118)
In reply to: Bash 5.0 released by XTerminator
Parent article: Bash 5.0 released

I gather it's rather obvious from looking at Cyberax' link. Commit messages in Bash repository are completely useless. They do not explain why the change is done (and what the change is about, which is often not clear), short messages do not convey any meaning and 5.0 commit was a big code drop of bundled unrelated changes.

As for being constructive: there are number of “good commit messages” guides (random searches: https://medium.com/compass-true-north/writing-good-commit... https://code.likeagirl.io/useful-tips-for-writing-better-...). Adopting *any* of the guidelines would increase quality of Bash repo.

Bash 5.0 released

Posted Jan 9, 2019 9:52 UTC (Wed) by XTerminator (subscriber, #59581) [Link]

Thanks for the explanation. :)

Bash 5.0 released

Posted Jan 9, 2019 16:46 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

On the other hand, all the changes were to tiny filesets apart from the last one. Plus the last one said DOCUMENTATION, implying it was NOT code.

My reading of this is maybe it's just simpler to look at the patch and it's documented there - although I will admit that that's a pain when you're trying to find which patch did something.

For a sole developer - seeing as all the commits were Chet - this doesn't seem to me at all unreasonable. Unless of course Cyberax knows more than me, he certainly seems to think there's more than one person maintaining bash ("these guys" - plural) - actually I'd be surprised ...

Cheers,
Wol

Bash 5.0 released

Posted Jan 10, 2019 17:52 UTC (Thu) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

Huh? It says "Sources and documentation". Of course it's code. And translations. And libreadline. And every other friggin' thing that is mentioned in that announcement, plus very likely a bunch that are not.

Yeah, Chet seems to be the sole developer. And with good reason. With that kind of commit history I wouldn't even dream of helping with bash development. I also wouldn't help with security-or-whatever audits – this would be plenty reason to switch to a different shell, except for the fact that Debian's default shell is dash. :-P

No, being a single developer is not an excuse for shoddy commit management. How do you find regressions in that kind of mess??

Bash 5.0 released

Posted Jan 9, 2019 17:35 UTC (Wed) by sb (subscriber, #191) [Link]

Just to point out that they do document their changes (see http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/bash.git/tree/CWRU/chang...). They just don't seem to want to do it in the commit messages.