I was looking through various RCON tools and found this. Someone does not like commit messages.
At least it’s better than me messing up with the commit date :v
lol how did u do that?
Don’t commit near a black hole, apparently
I think that there’s one important point to consider that may not be immediately obvious, when deciding about commit messages in FOSS project, even if you are not accepting contributions and just want to share your work for others - auditabilty.
7-zip has been receiving critique for this for a long time - not having commit messages makes it way harder to check what the actual changes were. Sure you can’t trust commit messages during an audit, but it makes it a lot easier - either you immediately notice that they are lying, or they are correct and will help you with understanding the change, so you can decide for yourself whether it’s safe.
Of course, the author is doing a lot of work for free, that he offers to others, so we have no right to blame him for it or demand he changes his approach. I’m grateful for any FOSS project, and demanding from someone directly that he’s doing it wrong and should do it some other way (or belittling him for it) isn’t OK. However, I’d probably be very careful when encountering a repository like this, and reconsider whether it’s worth adopting. Which is absolutely ok and I don’t blame the author for it in the slightest - it’s his repo and his work - but I also think that auditability may be something the author didn’t realize, and assuming his goal was to share his code with others i.e to build a portfolio, may affect his overall adoption rate. But it’s also ok if he simply doesn’t care about that.
But in general, if you’re making a FOSS project, I’d recommend sticking with good commit messages.
Commit messages are as much for me as other people tbh. As long as your commits aren’t massive I don’t really think it’s much work either for the benefits.
But like you say we have no right to demand anything from people giving up their free time for us. We can just choose not to use it.
Not really programming horror. Just open source. They did something, are kind enough to make it open, they don’t care about commit messages so what?
It’s certainly not as if anyone is entitled to anything better. It’s just bad practice. I wouldn’t want people critiquing me based on the work I do for free either, though.
And that’s the issue I have with that. Imagine you are fabricio and you find this post. Next time you probably won’t make it public even if there is a remote chance, that it might help someone else.
I agree, the post shouldn’t have called him out directly by name. It should’ve been a post of just a screenshot with the commit messages, and not mention the repository or the person. It’s definitely not nice, and may even affect the person - I mean, if I was called out like that somewhere and seen people laughing at my practices, I wouldn’t be exactly happy.
On the other hand, I think that raising the issue in itself - FOSS repositories without commit messages - is a pretty good discussion that fits here well. It’s just a shame that it had to be at the expense of some FOSS developer, because it also derails the discussion into talking more about the guy and whether he can or cannot do it (such as your comments, which I agree with), instead of focusing on what are the issues with FOSS projects without commit messages in general. Because there are many arguments why it’s important, and a few arguments about why it shouldn’t matter, which makes for an interresting discussion about best practices and why they are important.
Eh, I still think it’s worth calling out sloppy practices like this. At a minimum, drawing attention to it is a way to socialize good practices for others and to spark discussions (like this one!) Nobody is saying this person shouldn’t be putting code out there, they’re just pointing out some pretty gnarly code hygiene. One could argue this is actually one of the main strengths of open source development! Consider the parallel of somebody giving away free food- if they are using unsafe practices like not keeping things at proper temperatures or picking their nose while handling food, there’s nothing wrong with critiquing them, even if their intentions are good.
I agree, however I think that we could’ve raised the issue even without directly mentioning the developer or his repository, and could have discussed it without directly pointing at someone who did it.
Because that only derailed the discussion into whether he personally can or cannot do it (which he definitely can), instead of focusing on the best practices about commit messages in FOSS projects in general.
I also think that there’s a pretty huge difference between offering someone advice directly when interacting with him, such as your example about unsafe food practices, and posting a meme post with his name to an entirely unrelated social network.
So, for your example, I think it’s ok to either talk to the guy handing out food, to comment on his post about it. However, if you took a recording of him doing it, and posted it publicly to Facebook while mentioning him by name (and not even tagging him, so he isn’t notified) - that’s not a good way how to give meaningful feedback or critique.
This. Like if they are working for free for the public good, don’t complain if they don’t do it thoroughly enough. If someone volunteers to pick up trash from the park, you wouldn’t complain if he misses some things or stops before the whole park is clean.
Okay, so how is it possible to make quality open source software, if you don’t expect the programmer to do a good job, and instead you praise them for doing whatever?
Well, the first step is to not be an elitist gatekeeper who scares away any beginner who tries to develop open source stuff. Because even if their first few repositories were not exactly good, they may eventually get better, and if their experience with FOSS community was a pleasant one, there is a pretty high chance they will publish their later work too.
If, on the other hand, you publicly shame every mistake a beginner makes in hist first repository, they will probably never publish anything.
It’s important to praise anyone who’s self-less enough to write FOSS. Even if they aren’t exactly good yet, just the fact that they have decided to publish it is really important. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t offer any negative feedback - quite the contrary - but the feedback definitely shouldn’t be public shaming in a meme post on random social network.
