> If we ask new contributors to learn from the commit history, they are likely > to > find the inconsistency and feel confused.
simply decreasing complexity might be a reasonable choice here. an honest question follows that i cannot confidently judge, but i do have an intuition about: is the net balance of the following two a clear positive? 1) total time spent on learning, communicating, arguing, and writing the ChangeLog format messages for *every* commit (including the email excanges when patches are rejected, let alone debating which "right" format it is) 2) the *decrease* in total time spent searching around in the repo history and also considering that now we have `git log --patch --grep` and various other tools. PS: some of the second order effects could also be relevant here (e.g. filtering contributors for personality type), but i doubt that would be a conscious choice, and accordingly i don't see that discussed either. -- • attila lendvai • PGP: 963F 5D5F 45C7 DFCD 0A39 -- “When we become aware of how the school system is a conditioning agent to instill in children obedience to authority, passivity, and tolerance to tedium for the sake of external rewards, we begin to question school performance as a metric of well-being. Maybe a healthy child is one who resists schooling and standardization, not one who excels at it.” — Charles Eisenstein, 'The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible' (2013)