[Python-Dev] Commit messages: please avoid temporal ambiguity (original) (raw)
Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Mon May 9 19:24:20 CEST 2011
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A commit (push) partition time and behavior into before and after (with a short change period in between during which behavior is undefined).
Some commit messages have the form 'x does y'. Does 'does' mean before or after? Sometimes that is clear. 'x crashes' means before. 'x return correct value' means after. But some messages of this type are unclear to me as written.
Consider 'x raises exception'? The temporal reference is obvious to the committer but not necessary to everyone else. It could mean 'x used to segfault and now raises a catchable exception'. There was a fix like this (with a clear message) just today. It could also mean 'x used to raise but now return an answer. There have been many fixes like this.
Two minimal fixes are 'x raised exception' or 'make x raise exception'.
-- Terry Jan Reedy
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