[HN Gopher] The case of the curious commit message
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       The case of the curious commit message
        
       Author : ingve
       Score  : 30 points
       Date   : 2021-09-23 15:57 UTC (4 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (chrisoldwood.blogspot.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (chrisoldwood.blogspot.com)
        
       | yardstick wrote:
       | First thing that came to mind when I saw nt was "no text"
       | shorthand (or no topic). Can't quite pick where but suspect from
       | IRC a long time ago.
        
         | kelnos wrote:
         | That was my first assumption as well. I'd seen it used (and
         | used it myself) in usenet posts and email where the message was
         | short enough to fit in the subject line, so you'd just append
         | "[nt]" or something similar to end to note or confirm that
         | there was nothing to read in the body.
        
           | cecilpl2 wrote:
           | I definitely used this on 90s-era forums.
        
         | MaxLeiter wrote:
         | I cant imagine a huge use case on IRC, but ive definitely seen
         | nt used in old usenet posts
        
       | jph wrote:
       | That's an excellent gotcha discovery.
       | 
       | The post says "On the plus side this got people discussing what a
       | good commit message looked like". For git commit messages, and
       | making them easy, it turns out a git commit template can help
       | teammates ramp up:
       | 
       | https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/git-commit-template
        
       | combatentropy wrote:
       | This began as a story about the importance of well-worded commit
       | messages. It ended as yet another testimony against pop-ups.
        
       | vidanay wrote:
       | Dear Chris, your blog is not very readable on a 4k monitor.
        
       | ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
       | The old-school VCSes would force you to check out a file before
       | you could start using it. I never used ClearCase, but we used to
       | use VSS and Perforce. Both of these would lock the file on your
       | machine, until you "checked it out." You could configure them to
       | act as the case he describes acted, but we never bothered.
       | 
       | The need to "check out" a file, first, became rapidly
       | _infuriating_. People would deal with it by simply leaving their
       | files unlocked (using a shell script).  "Checking out" a file
       | would simply nudge the filesystem lock, _as long as the server
       | had not detected a change_. In the case there was no change, the
       | programmer could make changes,  "check out" the file, just before
       | checking it back in, and the server would get the change. If the
       | server had detected a change, however (it did not use checksums,
       | like Git. The server had a transaction database that it
       | consulted), it would overwrite the file on the programmer's
       | workstation, before "unlocking" it.
       | 
       | As you can imagine, this allowed me to vastly improve my
       | vocabulary of swear words, in several languages.
        
         | Buttons840 wrote:
         | I haven't used such systems, but I'm not surprised by the
         | outcome. Telling a developer they can't edit a text file on
         | their own computer is a system just begging to be worked
         | around.
        
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       (page generated 2021-09-27 23:01 UTC)