[squeak-dev] Trunk commits

Colin Putney cputney at wiresong.ca
Mon Aug 24 11:02:20 UTC 2009


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



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