Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] [RESEND2] Qemu unmaintained?

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 07:29:56PM +0100, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-09-10 at 19:35 +0300, Avi Kivity wrote:
> > Unfairly picking on Mark (who usually writes truly excellent changelogs, 
> > but this one is such a gem):
> > 
> > > Subject: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 01/19] Suppress more more kraxelism
> > >
> > > Let's kick off this series with some of the more critical fixes.
> > >
> > > Signed-off-by: Mark McLoughlin<address@hidden>
> > >    
> > 
> > What would you be thinking hunting the commit log for some change and 
> > coming up with this?
> > 
> > (Mark, apologies for picking on you, it's truly unfair of me, but I 
> > can't help it)
> 
> As you say, I normally try very hard with my changelogs, but I don't
> think the odd joke hurts much.

I don't mind jokes, but when I read that message I had not the slightest
idea what it might do, so in that case it hurts exactly as much as "." as
commit message hurts and not one iota less IMHO (note that I am not
necessarily advocating to leave jokes out, but at least they should come
with an explanation. Though considering an international community it
might be better to avoid jokes in log messages completely).
I'd also like to point out that the reference to "this series" is
another reason I don't like it when log messages are created from emails
unedited, such references are (probably sometimes) useful when sending
a patch series but become completely meaningless in a log message since
it is impossible to find out what it refers to.