Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 23/33] diff-merges: fix style of functions definitions

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 2020 17:41:07 -0800

Sergey Organov <[email-masked]> writes:

> When Junio noticed and pointed to this deficiency, I asked him if I
> should fix all the series from the start, or it'd be OK to use fixup
> commit. As he didn't answer and nobody else commented either, I opted
> for the latter.

Sorry if it slipped through the cracks---I get too many discussion
threads to pay attention to.

Yes, we strongly prefer *not* to keep the honest history that
records all the mistakes we made along the way.  Rather, we take the
time a topic is still in flight and not yet cast in stone by merged
to 'next' as an opportunity to pretend that the topic came to
existence in the perfect shape, thanks to collective brain effort.

It is our basic courtesy to future developers who has to read our
code (i.e. "log -p") to understand what we've been thinking, when
they want to fix some stupid bugs we will inevitably leave in our
codebase.  It is distracting to read from the beginning of a topic,
notice something funny going on and keep moveing to later patches,
while harboring puzzlement in our minds, then later discover that
the funny thing we noticed earlier was a simple mistake that gets
fixed, not some clever trick the reader needs to think deeply to
understand.

Thanks.