Wine developer frustration (was Re: ntdll: Improve stub of NtQueryEaFile.)

[Ken Thomases]

On Jun 17, 2015, at 2:59 PM, Andrew Eikum <aeikum at codeweavers.com> wrote:

> I often try to write good commit messages, but it seems kind of
> pointless because I know they'll be removed.

They aren't universally removed.  Alexandre sometimes edits them down, but most of the commits of my patches have a good chunk of what I wrote.  And I'm often pretty verbose.  (See, for example, <http://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git/?a=commit;h=792b47ad3b89d51f17ef311ccaa62fc2016af793>.)  It's always possible that I'm a special case because a) I mostly work on the Mac driver, about which Alexandre couldn't give two figs; and b) I've worn him down by writing too much too often. ;)

I try to help Alexandre by putting the core information that helps future developers (including future me) understand what the patch is for and what it does toward the top and then things like justification or help for reviewers lower down.  That way, his edit just amounts to cutting the message off at a certain point.

> I have no idea where Wine's policy of stripping commit messages comes
> from and I dislike it.

As I say, I don't believe there is such a policy.  My impression is that you're not the only person who thinks there is, though.  Between that and some developers' natural terseness (and, sometimes, assumption that their changes are always self-explanatory), few developers write much.

Another problem is that the email submission format doesn't offer a way for the submitter to separate text intended to be part of the permanent commit log from text intended to be merely commentary for consumption at review time.  So, Alexandre has to exercise judgment about which parts are which kind and may mis-categorize.

-Ken