Subject: Re: [PATCH] branch: use $curr_branch_short more

From: René Scharfe <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 08 Sep 2013 17:21:23 +0200

Am 31.08.2013 19:20, schrieb Felipe Contreras:
> A summary should contain as much information that would allow me to
> skip the commit message as possible.
>
> If I can't tell from the summary if I can safely skip the commit
> message, the summary is not doing a good job.
>
> "trivial simplification" explains the "what", and the "why" at the
> same time, and allows most people to skip the commit message, thus is
> a good summary.

No patch should be skipped on the mailing list.  As you wrote, trivial 
patches can still be wrong.

When going through the history I can see that quickly recognizing 
insubstantial changes is useful, but if I see a summary twice then in my 
mind forms a big question mark -- why did the same thing had to be done 
yet again?

As an example, both 0d12e59f (pull: replace unnecessary sed invocation) 
and bc2bbc45 (pull, rebase: simplify to use die()) could arguably have 
had the summary "trivial simplification", but I'm glad the author went 
with something a bit more specific.

I agree that some kind of tagging with keywords like "trivial", "typo" 
and so on can be helpful, though.

> Again, triviality and correctness are two separate different things.
> The patch is trivial even if you can't judge it's correctness.

Well, in terms of impact I agree.

> To me, what you are describing is an obvious patch, not a trivial one.
> An obvious patch is so obvious that you can judge it's correctness
> easily by looking at the diff, a trivial one is of little importance.

That's one definition; I think I had the mathematical notion in mind 
that calls proofs trivial which are immediately evident.

René