On Fri, 29 Feb 2008, Mike Bird wrote: > I'm not a DD but I've been programming since 1963 when I was 7. > Based on decades of software engineering experience, I would > just like to remind you to USE THE FSCKING SOURCE!!!
I am not sure this applies to dpkg, but in kernel land, the full reasoning behind even one-line trivial patches to some deep-magic areas are just plain impossible to understand without a ton of explanations in the log. > Logs are not the source. No matter how much time you waste > fiddling with them, they are really unimportant. Programmers Sorry, I don't agree with you. Logs are important. Especially if one member of the team quits, and another has to join in and find out exactly what was happening to the code at that point in time (as opposed to reading the code at that point in time, to know how it looked like). > should be documented in a design document or noted in a comment. Comments have this very bad property of getting stale, which really is a damn pity, as comments are in the code and therefore extremely more likely to be read by someone trying to modify that area of the code. Logs are never stale, as they are only valid at one exact point in time and they are tied to a specific set of changes anyway. But they don't have the extreme advantage of locality that comments do. You need *both*, and you need to take good care of *both*. > Time spent prettifying logs is time that could be better spent > programming or packaging or playing with the grandkids. That does not work well in large development teams. -- "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot Henrique Holschuh -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
