Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 03/10] trailer: unify trailer formatting machinery

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 02 Feb 2024 09:26:53 -0800

Linus Arver <[email-masked]> writes:

> The hard part is not so much the rearranging of
> code but rather thinking up of good commit messages to explain the
> intent of each smaller step.

Good.

Coming up with a good explanation of what you did forces you to
think it thorough again.  People often discover bugs in the code
they just wrote, or different and better ways to solve the problem,
while explaining the change to their colleagues, and I found it has
very similar effect to try to write a good explanation in the commit
log.  Time to write such a good explanation is time worth investing
in.

Incidentally, this is why we value clearly written proposed log
message while reviewing.  A commit that is a product of "I tried
this, which did not work, and then tried something else, which did
not work either, and after some more random tries, this seems to
work" would not have a clear thinking behind it, but if such
iterations of random tries happened to hit the best solution,
thinking backwards from the result to the original problem and
explaining how the solution works would result in a good
description.

Thanks.