[plt-dev] One e-mail per commit?

On May 17, Michael Sperber wrote:
> Sam Tobin-Hochstadt <samth at ccs.neu.edu> writes:
> 
> > On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 8:33 AM, Eli Barzilay <eli at barzilay.org> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>> Possibly, it makes sense to avoid sending e-mails on merge commits,
> >>> but that's only a bonus.
> >>
> >> I don't think so: eg, Sam's recent merge of a long lived branch could
> >> have (or might have) been pushed as a single merge commit.
> 
> You mean the individual commits from that branch did not get copied to
> the main repo?

It depends on the policy of reporting: right now, if those commits
were already reported on some branch then they might not be reported
again on the master branch.


> > Further, I don't see how it would be useful to try to understand that
> > merge in terms of 30+ emails, all sent at the same time.  

Note that Sam's merge was 86 commits.


> I'm assuming that the granularity of your commits communicate
> something useful about the genesis of what you're doing - that's why
> we want them in the version history in the first place.  If the 30+
> commits can only be understood as a whole, they should be pushed as
> a single commit, not 30+.

I'm sure that those 86 commits are important for *Sam* -- but as far
as *I'm* concerned it's all a big blurry "stuff happened in typed
scheme".  I certainly don't want to start thinking about squashing my
commits just because it's uninteresting for other people -- and
together with that, I don't want to hear my laptop beep constantly for
an hour because Sam used a long branch.

Here's a more concrete example that I've used a few times now: when I
wrote the newly optimized sort, I had about 5 commits in one night
(should have been done on a git branch, if we had git at the time).
I can promise you that the intermediate commits are uninteresting to
anyone (who is not interested in maintaining that code) -- and I had
them all at the same time before I started committing, so I *could*
have done the whole thing at one shot (and with svn, there was an
argument saying that I should have).  But those commits are very
important to me -- and the though of considering preserving that
history vs apologizing for 5 emails instead of one seems like a very
bad idea.

(And to put things in an even more concrete light: say that we had an
email/commit.  I often mail myself a list of things to buy when I go
to a supermarket so I can read it there -- what if Sam pushed his 86
commits while I was on my way?  I'd be standing there in the parking
lot (no good reception inside), slowly making my way to get to my
shopping list.)

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!