On 24-Aug-09, at 1:27 AM, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
PROPOSAL: we make the detailed commit notices go to a separate list as soon as someone has added a "digest" feature. This would send a daily or weekly summary to squeak-dev, containing just the commit summary a link to the detailed diffs. Bonus points for listing affected classes.
-1.
There are two problems with this. First, batching the commit messages lengthens the feedback loop that the messages create. If there's a message for every commit, the message can be sent right after the commit is made. The community can react and provide feedback to the developer immediately. If that feedback days or even just a few hours, it's too late to be useful. The developer has moved on mentally, and even if he can remember exactly what he did and why, it's no longer fresh in his mind.
Second, the worry that individual messages demand too much attention is certainly legitimate. But by batching the messages into a digest we actually make it harder to manage those demands for attention. Most email clients offer filtering systems that allow messages to be processed automatically; with automatically generated message like these message filters are very effective. Even if you process the messages manually, it's easy to scan the subject lines and read only those messages that are interesting to you. But a daily or weekly digest is much more difficult to process automatically. It's also harder to process manually - you have to not only scan for the packages you're interested in, but skip over the details of the commits that are not interesting.
In short, daily or weekly digests are great if you want to ignore the messages entirely, but not so useful if you want to actually read and respond to them.
Colin