Commits as Poetry
February 6th, 2009
Although I can’t remember where, I once heard the sentiment Code is Poetry. I’ve always looked at coding as an art form and there is a definite distinction between clean and ugly code.
That’s not what this post is about. This post is about me being a smart ass.
The following e-mail came in on the Spacewalk mailing list this morning.
Folks have been doing pretty good with using the proper commit message
format. I applaud you for that. But, yes there is a bug, can we try
and use more descriptive commit messages? They don't have to be epic
poems, but something other than:
- a few more schema fixes
- fixed bug XXXX
Don’t get me wrong, I completely agree with it. Back on the RHQ project, there were an annoying number of commit messages that just said “Fixed JIRA 12345″. That’s irritating since you have to consult JIRA to find out what a commit was about, and if there was still an issue you couldn’t tell what the developer was at least attempting to do.
But like I said, I’m a jackass. I picked up on the “epic poems” part of that request and decided my next commit message would be done in the form of a haiku:
484285 -
Large classes are bad
Refactor and make cleaner
So can fix next bug
It was easier than I thought it would be. Next time to make things a bit trickier, I’m thinking of trying iambic pentameter. Who says code is the only place you can find poetry in a software project?
