Subject: More CVS work on the way

From: Jason L Tibbitts III <[email-masked]>
Date: 28 Jan 2003 18:13:36 -0600

Folks, after I get back in from dinner I'm going to start some work on
the CVS server.  The first order of business is to toss the commit
scripts we're using and move to something more recent.  The next step
will be to set up an ACL system.

This should all be pretty low impact.  It's possible that a few commit
messages will come out odd until I tweak things.

One question, however: I've hacked the new commit scripts to include
diffs up to a certain size, which I've currently set at 100 lines.
I've always liked seeing diffs as part of a commit message, but I'm
not sure how big they should be allowed to get.  Is 100 lines about
right, or should I go larger?

 - J<
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From: Dan Espen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Jan 2003 20:08:01 -0500

> right, or should I go larger?

100 lines won't bother me.

I hope you'll be bypassing diffs on the screenshot images.
I think most of them were checked in as binary.

-- 
Dan Espen                           E-mail: [email-masked]

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From: Mikhael Goikhman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2003 01:53:03 +0000

> right, or should I go larger?

I would not include any diffs, or we need 2 mailing lists, one for
discussions and one for the full cvs logs/diffs.

Probably such my preference is because I usually always see diffs (when
have a time) by issuing something similar to "cvs diff -D now | less"
prior to every "cvs update".

I am often very busy and I _really_ prefer to see one resulting diff of
the Dominik's work for several days than many small and sometimes non
relevant diffs, one fixing another. Also think about many messages that
just say "updated dates", "updated for new release number". Additionally,
if someone decides to reindent a file, this should not be a reason to skip
the changes done to another file, because of the size limit. So for me
auto-diffs are not a solution and I will continue to use my "cvs diff"
method anyway, so auto-diffs would only distract my attention.

Finally, one more argument against diff. In 90% of cases it is more than
enough to see the headers of commits. I am not interested to see diffs
when a function name is changed (in dozens of files), or changes done to
lex/yacc files (autogenerated), or translations, or some html and images,
or changes done to all man pages autogenerated from pod (by me), or all
autogenerated html pages. I want a short summary instead, just like now.
There are better ways to get diffs when one needs them. If we really
decide to polute this list with a non indexable information, we should
split it.

Regards,
Mikhael.

---

From: Jason L Tibbitts III <[email-masked]>
Date: 28 Jan 2003 20:54:33 -0600

>>>>> "DE" == Dan Espen <[email-masked]> writes:

DE> I hope you'll be bypassing diffs on the screenshot images. I think
DE> most of them were checked in as binary.

Yeah, it doesn't diff binary files.  I'm not really sure what a diff
of a binary would look like anyway.

 - J<

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From: Jason L Tibbitts III <[email-masked]>
Date: 28 Jan 2003 21:01:11 -0600

>>>>> "MG" == Mikhael Goikhman <[email-masked]> writes:

MG> I would not include any diffs, or we need 2 mailing lists, one for
MG> discussions and one for the full cvs logs/diffs.

[...]

Well, that's the longest discourse against something that you don't
even have to read I've seen in a long time.  The idea was to include
just a little more information when it makes sense; as you may note, I
currently have it limited to 100 lines of diff so it's not as if the
full diffs are always included.  I find that anything that saves me
the time required to go to a shell and type some cvs commands is an
improvement.  Especially for small bug and typo fixes where there's
little point in composing a long commit message that would end up
larger than the fix itself.

But hey, I'll certainly use it for my projects and if you folks don't
want it then I'll just leave the option off.

I suppose you'd argue similarly against including diffstat output?

 - J<

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From: Dominik Vogt <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2003 12:27:28 +0100

> larger than the fix itself.

I completely agree with Mikhael here.  I am not interested at all
in the diffs 99% of the time.  In the past, I looked at the
diffs of a specific commit about two times a year.  And even if
the need arose more frequently, I would have almost certainly
deleted the commit message in the mean time.  I like the way we
have it now:  full comments in the ChangeLog, a good wrapup in the
commit message, and "cvs diff" if I ever need more information.

> I suppose you'd argue similarly against including diffstat output?

Bye

Dominik ^_^  ^_^

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From: Mikhael Goikhman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2003 11:33:49 +0000

> larger than the fix itself.

I don't agree with the last sentence, you may spend days to fix a bug
that results in one character fix, noone will be able to understand it
without a short summary. Replacing short descriptions with diffs is not
a good idea. I really prefer to see accurate mail messages saying
"* s/built in/built-in/" than hundreds of context lines of diffs.

Compare the current compact message of my last commit and the forced diff
of this commit that is 43Kb (!). Please do it to see what we are going to
receive with auto-diffs:

  cd bin; cvs diff -D '2003-01-29 11:00 GMT' -D '2003-01-29 12:00 GMT'

> I suppose you'd argue similarly against including diffstat output?

diffstat may be ok if its output has fixed size, I don't know.

BTW, did you plan to post full files that are added or deleted from cvs?
If no, the whole auto-diff idea is broken, not just annoying/useless.

To improve the usefulness of the cvs and mailing lists, I suggest
(actually this was suggested for a long time) the following:

  * have separate fvwm and fvwm-workers archives that are searchable
  * setup web-cvs, so any diff output in a nice colorful form is possible
  * put all scripts that generate auto-mails/snapshots into cvs

For example I always disliked that leading spaces are stripped from the
cvs log messages, I would be able to fix this myself. Thank you very much.

Regards,
Mikhael.

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From: Mikhael Goikhman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2003 12:55:33 +0000

On 29 Jan 2003 12:50:02 +0100, Dominik Vogt wrote (privately):
> > cvs log messages, I would be able to fix this myself.
> 
> > Thank you very much.
> 
> Um, Mikhael, although I agree with you on this topic, don't you
> think the tone of your mail is too harsh?

Not by intention. I don't see how else to express arguments against
something that you are fully convinced is not good.

> Especially the last
> sentence can easily be read as "now shut up, idiot".  I am not
> sure how much of this was intended by you and how much I am
> interpreting into it.

Hmm, interesting interpretation, but I only thanked Jason in advance if
he does 3 listed tasks, nothing else. :)

Regards,
Mikhael.