Reducing kernel-maintainer burnout

Posted Nov 27, 2023 10:13 UTC (Mon) by fschrempf (subscriber, #160781)
In reply to: Reducing kernel-maintainer burnout by laurent.pinchart
Parent article: Reducing kernel-maintainer burnout

> I'm appalled that after so many years neither github nor gitlab has implemented the ability to comment on a commit message. I agree this is likely one of the factors that explain why so many projects have terrible commit message hygiene. Surely this can't be that complex to implement compared to the zillions of features that those forges provide, which makes me wonder if they have consciously decided not to provide the feature, have never tried their own dog good, or if github/gitlab are also developed with bad commit message hygiene.

GitLab being an open-source project one could argue that simply no one ever cared enough to step up and implement the feature. The same argument kernel maintainers would use for some kernel related feature requests. Looking at the 6-year-old issue at https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/19691 it looks like there has been some interest over the years but not enough for someone to actually do the necessary work.

And yes, a lot of projects developed on GitLab/GitHub suffer from bad commit message hygiene which is a pity in most cases, but some project development workflows are designed a lot differently than the kernel one and don't even really allow (or care?) to have a clean Git history (e. g. due to a lot of merge commit and bot commit noise).