Re: Impact: (was Re: [PATCH] update rwlock initialization fornat_table)

[Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo]

Em Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 05:19:35PM -0800, Andrew Morton escreveu:
> On Tue, 16 Dec 2008 04:10:39 +0300 Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Speaking of Impact: lines, is this a new fashion or what?
> > 
> > Looking at the ones which are already in official tree, they are either
> > trivially duplicating Subject: line, or effectively duplicating Subject: line,
> > or cover up for insufficiently informative (read: badly written) Subject: line,
> > or simply useless.
> > 
> > 
> > 	Subject: sched: CPU remove deadlock fix
> > 	Impact: fix possible deadlock in CPU hot-remove path
> > 
> > What prevented to write "Subject: sched: fix possible deadlock in CPU hot-remove path"?
> > 
> > 
> > 	AMD IOMMU: __unmap_single: check for bad_dma_address instead of 0
> > 	Impact: minor fix
> > 
> > Well...
> > 
> > I have an idea on how to make them remotely useful, but can we agree that there is
> > a problem arising here?
> 
> heh, I must say that the ones I've seen haven't been very useful.
> 
> However...  Given the amount of time I (and others, to a lesser extent)
> spend complaining about and scratching heads over crappy changelogs, we
> would benefit from having a standard changelog template.
> 
> Something which guides people to creating a good changelog.  But it
> would have to be short, and carefully written.  It should learn from
> history, to wit:
> 
> - ./REPORTING-BUGS has a template and afaik it has never elicited any
>   useful information.
> 
> - Documentation/SubmittingPatches has info on how to write a
>   changelog, and people blithely ignore it.
> 
> - kerneldoc provide a template of sorts, and we see that filling out
>   templates puts people's brains into "filling out a template" mode,
>   rather than into "communicating information" mode.
> 
> An interesting problem.

Well, if git commit could add that template in addition to the
Signed-off-by line, that could be a start, perhaps as a new option and
then it would get it from .git/changelog-template, that would be
provided by each project.

/me scratches head...

    -t, --template <FILE>
                              use specified template file

Its there already, but then perhaps what is needed is a _default_
template.

- Arnaldo
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