Re: How can we decrease the cognitive overhead for contributors?

[Csepp]

Maxim Cournoyer <maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi,
>
> Csepp <raingloom@riseup.net> writes:
>
> [...]
>
>>>> Regarding the GNU changelog commits, I really dislike them. They're
>>>> redundant busy-work as far as I'm concerned. And while I'd like to say
>>>> they're no longer necessary, because we have better tooling
>>>
>>> As said before, I use them all the time through
>>>    git log | grep "whatever I am looking for"
>>> or the interactive
>>>    git log
>>> then "/" for searching inside the less command; I find it useful to a point
>>> that I have moved to this style for all my coding projects.
>>>
>>> So as far as I am concerned, they are tremendously useful. Well, that may
>>> be due to a lack of git knowledge, of course! But while in other projects
>>> I often find I need to look at the content of commits, in Guix it is often
>>> enough to just look at the changelog.
>>>
>>> Andreas
>>
>> What's wrong with grepping the contents as well?
>
> It's like a 100 times slower, at least on my low spec machine.  It's
> also not as obvious (you search for lines added or removed or changed,
> not easy language such as 'gnu: package-name: Add').

Hmm, that's a quite valid criticism.  I haven't tried grepping commit
contents on my netbook yet, but this suggests that it would be pretty
slow.
But some info is still redundant, like file names.  Git already supports
getting the history of a file, so file names might not be necessary in
the log.
I agree that important identifiers should still be mentioned, but I'm
not sure if the current format is the best way to do that.