[josm-dev] Commit message not empty

[Matt Amos]

On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 10:39 AM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> The "leave empty if unsure" makes it easy for users to ignore the
> concept and I don't want to make this easy for them.

have a look at wikipedia's commit messages
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges) which are
optional. well, they default to the section heading you're editing,
but that doesn't translate to OSM... it seems many people do end up
putting sensible messages in the commit, so it looks like they're
learning to use it rather than ignore it.

On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 2:22 PM, Pieren <pieren3 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 3:09 PM, Dermot McNally
>
> I think that empty comments are better than innappropriate comments.
> "guessed" comments will be hard to implement and will most probably
> not help better than crappy comments.

commit comments are very useful for software version control systems.
but even working with experienced developers i've seen meaningless
commit messages. writing good commit messages is a skill in itself.

> I would suggest the following :
> each time you start JOSM and first time you leave the comment field
> empty, pop-up a warning messagebox explaining how comments are
> important for collaboration, although not mandatory.

this kind of nag-ware could be useful. make it an "expert" option to
disable it entirely and have the argument for good commit messages in
the FAQ section for disabling it. if people ask on the mailing list
they can be referred to that, rather than people arguing back and
forth over whether its better to force people to eat their greens or
not.

cheers,

matt