On 08.12.2015 15:04, Ilia Mirkin wrote: > On Tue, Dec 8, 2015 at 8:43 AM, Ernst Sjöstrand <ernstp at gmail.com> wrote: >> Hello list! >> >> I lurk here and try to follow Mesa/DRI and most specifically Radeon >> driver development, report bugs, test new stuff and help get the bugs >> closed and so on... >> >> However I see that the commit messages for AMD/Radeon are often very >> unhelpful. They don't state the motivation behind the commits. Is this >> a optimization, a nice-to-have cleanup or does this actually fix >> something? What does this fix? >> Are there tests or bugreports related? >> >> Improving this could make it easier for new developers to start >> contributing in the long run also! >> >> Examples: >> >> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/?id=d5a5dbd71f0e8756494809025ba2119efdf26373 >> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/?id=338d7bf0531a10d90db75ad333f7e0a31693641f >> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/?id=4ebcf5194d98b47bd9e8a72b7418054708b14750 >> >> This is also in the mesa dev guidelines, www.mesa3d.org/devinfo.html : >> "Patch fix is not clearly described. For example, a commit message of >> only a single line, no description of the bug, no mention of bugzilla, >> etc." > So... what's the appropriate amount? Have every commit describe, in > detail, how the GPU works, how the driver works, and what little bit > of interaction is being changed? I'm not an AMD developer (I do hack > on nouveau though), but I basically get what all 3 of the above are > doing. The reason why you're having trouble is probably because you > don't know what the ingredients are -- what's a mip level, what's a > ring index, what's fence, what's a winsys, what's a "emit vertex", all > in the context of the relevant drivers. If you know what all these > things are, the above commits become much clearer. But having to > describe each of those things every time would ... not fly :)
Yeah, exactly. I work for AMD but mostly on the kernel side and I wasn't involved in any of those patches, nor with the surrounding source code. But I do get just by reading the subject lines what all of those are about. So it's more about knowing the driver and the hardware a bit to understand what's going on here. While it often could be a bit more, describing everything in the commit message is way to much. Regards, Christian. > > You can usually tell a cleanup/hypothetical fix apart from a real fix > by seeing if it (a) references a bugzilla, (b) mentions a commit it > fixes, or (c) cc'd to stable. > > -ilia > _______________________________________________ > dri-devel mailing list > dri-devel at lists.freedesktop.org > http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel
