avgcorrection

I thought taking a hardline anti-Vietnam war stance in 2023 would be a slam-dunk but apparently not.

“Some of you Vietnamese will die... but that’s a sacrifice that I’m willing to make.” Something like that?

How could killing people on the other side of the world over ideology achieve anything (show for it)?

I have a long text document where I put all ad hoc how-to related to the place where I spend half of my everyday life. For me only. Then I might migrate it to something more structured or share it with others. (But not the document itself. That’s a profanity-full/safe space.)

Considering that some blog post about something can remain relevant for years—as opposed to some off-hand tip given verbally—, it is definitely difficult to just share knowledge in a way that cost you next to nothing. You could give some great advice that works now. But doesn’t in two years. And then it might be counter-productive.

Yeah, it looks like this would be problem for Rust’s `String` (owned) although not `&str` (borrowed).

The issue is still Open.

Yeah okay. I hadn’t ever thought that they wouldn’t be.

> We don't use it for documentation of changes made, we have better tools for that.

That’s interesting. Is the documentation in the project management system? What tool is that?

I wonder how many upvotes are for the slightly ambiguous title.

> I was responding to the author of the comment I was responding to, who was anthropomorphizing the commit itself claiming that it did something.

Uh huh. The comment that you replied to is pretty much in line with the wider “patch does X to the code” which isn’t about anthropomorphizing. That’s the spin that you put on it.

It’s about as much anthrop. as saying that a falling piano crushed someone’s leg.

> We do it for usability and other reasons and one only needs to look at git itself to recognize that the original authors did not have usability in mind when designing it. What they built is incredibly powerful, but it's rare for usability and technical prowess to overlap.

It’s also rare to find commit message quality that is on the level of the regular contributors to that project. Which has nothing to do with how unfortunate the UX of the tool is.

That is very possible to do. People overwrite their save data or their files without any VCS getting in the way.

It’s not like you need the history (is this a refactor or something else? doesn’t matter) so you don’t need to keep around such failed attempts.

> It's just super impractical.

But that’s the whole point of a version control system. That’s all it is for.

If that is super impractical then our VCSs (Git and others) must be too impractical to use.

I agree that the ticket id should go somewhere in the commit message. Certainly if things like pull requests are tied to tickets. However I get a little concerned that such sentiments are so popular here. Because the ticket id is a nice contextual link. But the commit message should be self-contained with regards to the change.[1]

It’s a version control system. That includes an explanation as well. The explanation for each revision is integral.

And I don’t think people here really disagree with that. Just that they might prefer to put all that integral information somewhere else—the information (princess) is in another castle, Mario. Why? Why not at least just copy-paste the relevant information into the version control system proper? I see this all the time; people often do the same with GitHub pull requests—paragraphs upon paragraphs in the pull request description and then just a “Merge <convoluted URL>” in the merge commit message!

It’s not that I blame people for this. Maybe Git is just so unergonomic that many would prefer to offload everything into another interface (even Jira).

[1] My tickets will usually have all the history. Maybe a lot of back and forth. The commit message though will just have what was done when all was said and done—no back and forth, just the result. And some of my tickets probably don’t even have a description body since what I ended up doing is just described in the commit message.

It has nothing to do with anthropomorphizing. The Git project uses the style of:

    Refactor x

As in: command (verb: refactor) the code to change in this way. That a person wrote the code is irrelevant.

I love that (when) commit messages are for people first. I don’t want to read stilted and robotic commit messages just because someone wanted to shave off five minutes when creating whatever software artifact like a changelog.

Maybe version control is a cargo cult, then? You might as well just make commits without commit messages if the revision comment is useless. Maybe just squash all commits between versions so you just have one commit per version.

> I would say however that the commit messages mostly are just squashed pull requests with ticket names and single sentence so I'd agree that they wouldn't be very good for that purpose, but I don't see anyone at the org complaining about this.

There’s your answer.

> Sometimes people just want to feel smart more than be smart.

Yeah.

Yeah you’re not saying anything.

What’s the point of even replying to comments like grandparent. Those points are phrased as person-specific dogmas, not advice.

There is always a history. Which does not imply a good reason.

I rarely butt into practices for languages that I don’t use.[1] But having a flag for “are we type-checking” is a, well, huge red flag.

[1] Except some light scripting

The ego and the mind are not the same.

It’s difficult enough to figure out which side goes up. I can’t worry about this as well.

Huh? That was just a non-funny aside.

“We’re not all the same!”, the nerds said in unison. “Frank here is into DnD while Bob is only interested in gaming RPGs; Liza doesn’t play computer games and is mostly interested in anime and Japanese culture; meanwhile Frank is into hiking, geotagging, and photo editing.”

When people see stereotypes or “types”, the point is never—unless they are genuinely denigrating them—that they are completely alien or that whatever institution they belong to is not “made up of humans”.

A sentiment coming from the petite bourgeoisie or those of that viewpoint.

Imagine if I could demand that only people who have upvoted my comment could reply to it? I would get much less disagreeable replies.

In general those things seem like site-specific bookmarks. As a general principle I want to just use one bookmark feature for all web things.