[darcs-users] darcs patch: Resolve issue1093: warn about ugly patch... (and 1 more)

Dan Pascu dan at ag-projects.com
Tue Feb 3 17:56:57 UTC 2009


On Tuesday 03 February 2009, Ben Franksen wrote:
> Eric Kow wrote:
> > On Mon, Feb 02, 2009 at 20:31:39 +1100, Trent W. Buck wrote:
> >> Under what circumstances is it desirable for a patch name to *not*
> >> be a sentence?
> >
> > Not all projects are prestigious and sometimes people just want to
> > throw together a quick little repository.  I've also flip-flopped
> > between putting punctuation and not (seeing it as superfluous),
> > although now that I hear somebody else saying that it's good to have,
> > I'll be a good boy from now on.  (That said, it's not clear if we
> > always want a sentence, maybe sometimes a noun phrase is more
> > direct?)
> >
> > I think this patch is a bit too helpful.  It's really just a gut
> > feeling, and it could be wrong.  My personal approval vote is:
> >
> >  YES - warn on patches starting with '-'
> >  YES - warn on "strange" patch names http://bugs.darcs.net/issue1000
> >  MAYBE - warn on overly long patch names (as this could cause some
> >          concrete practical problems for other folks, wrt wrapping)
> >  NO - warn on patch names < 10
> >  NO - warn on punctuation
> >
> > I don't want this to turn into bikeshed either.  Maybe we could hear
> > from three more users?
>
> What is wrong about "fixed issue #12345" ?
>
> In fact, I /never/ use punctuation at the end of a patch name and
> always start lower case. This is clearly a matter of convention and the
> tool should be completely agnostic w.r.t. such conventions. Anything
> else is intrusive and thus annoying.

I agree. It's an absolute NO to impose someone's view on style on 
everybody else. Unless you can make these conventions selectable per 
repository, so that one can impose a set of rules per project, but not in 
another, then they are just annoyances. This way they can be useful to 
enforce a set of rules in a given project to all contributors when 
needed, while leaving me the freedom to not use any conventions at all in 
my projects if I don't want to.

As for issue1000, how do you define a "strange" name and where do you 
stop? It's infinitely better from the user experience point of view to 
offer undo capabilities than to warn you everytime you do something 
considered "unapproved" or even worse to present you with the "Are you 
sure?" question. Experience shows that people quickly learn to ignore the 
repetitive warnings and answer with the default answer (usually by 
pressing Enter), to avoid something perceived as being most of the time 
an annoyance, which may result in them ending in the same erroneous state 
you are trying to prevent.

-- 
Dan


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