[josm-dev] Change to changeset comment handling, RfD

[Anthony]

On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 1:01 AM, Marko Mäkelä <marko.makela at iki.fi> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 03, 2010 at 08:08:56PM -0400, Anthony wrote:
>>>
>>> The quality of my own changeset comments is absolutely irrelevant in this
>>> discussion; let's assume, if it gives you pleasure, that they are all just
>>> "...". That might discredit the messenger, but not change anything about the
>>> message. I think that it is important to keep the two separate, the message
>>> and the messenger.
>>
>> "minor haiti geometry repair"
>> "fix source typo"
>> "fix self-intersecting boundary"
>> "move lake from one relation to other"
>> "remove forest self-intersection"
>>
>> Is that you?
>
> Being a programmer and a daily user of version control systems, I share
> Frederik's view that some effort should be made to write good changeset
> comments. They can be useful later, say, after several months or years.

So do I...  I just think it's unrealistic to expect it every time.
IMO the job of the software should be to make sure the person knows
the software has the ability to use comments.  Not to make it
difficult for them not to use comments.

If we decide as a community that all edits *must* have comments, of a
certain length, (and we shouldn't), then that should be enforced in
the API.

> Of the above comments, I think that the first one is questionable, almost as
> bad as the "fixes" or "adjustments" regularly written by some long-time
> contributors. The remaining ones are descriptive, if the changesets contain
> just that (e.g., replace source=lndsat with source=Landsat, fix polygons or
> multipolygons). Nobody is perfect, at least not all the time. :-)

Well, I think they're all pretty much useless.  As in I can't think of
a use case where they would be more than trivially useful for someone
other than the editor himself/herself.  If *that* is the kind of
comment we're trying to put pressure on people to make, I think we're
wasting *everyone's* time.  Certainly the time of the people who
otherwise wouldn't have written such a comment.

OTOH, if we're trying to get people to make comments that explain
something that isn't evident from the edit itself, then 1) that's
clearly unrealistic; and 2) the changes to the software aren't really
geared to that anyway (as no technical rules really can be).