Re: [GIT PULL afs: Development for 5.4

[Linus Torvalds]

On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 4:09 AM David Howells <dhowells@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Here's a set of patches for AFS.  The first three are trivial, deleting
> unused symbols and rolling out a wrapper function.

Pulled.

However, I was close to unpulling it again. It has a merge commit with
this merge message:

    Merge remote-tracking branch 'net/master' into afs-next

and that simply is not acceptable.

Commit messages need to explain the commit. The same is even more true
of merges!

In a regular commit, you can at least look at the patch and say "ok,
that  change is obvious and self-explanatory".

In a merge commit, the _only_ explanation you have is basically the
commit message, and when the commit message is garbage, the merge is
garbage.

If you can't explain why you are doing a merge, then you shouldn't do
the merge. It's that simple.

And if you can't be bothered to write the explanation down, I'm not
sure I can be bothered to then pull the end result.

             Linus