Re: [PATCH v3] git-p4: add option to preserve user names

On 08/05/11 18:32, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Luke Diamand[off-list ref]  writes:

quoted

quoted

It looks to me that the message is not helping the users, even though it
may help as a debugging aid for git-p4 developers.

Should I just remove it?

I guess it only adds a small amount of information which could be
explained in the instructions.

I was trying to get a feel of how much thinking went behind that message,
by suggesting a possible improvement to help users who forgot to pass the
new option when they might have wanted to, instead of just assuring users
who did pass the option when the command did the right thing for them.

People learn to quickly ignore repeated and regular messages. They will
learn that they will get that message whenever they pass the new option,
and they learn that most of the time it says what they wanted, and will
easily miss when the username you put in the message is different from
what they expect.

In our commit template, we say "# Author: author name" when and only when
it is different from you. Most of the time, you are committing your own
commit, so this line is _unusual_ and that is very much deliberate.

If you do not think of a good way to improve the "help" part of the patch,
that is Ok. We are still making progress by giving a functionality that
has been missing.

To remove or to keep, I am less qualified to judge than either you or
Pete. I'm not the primary audience. If you think it helps users, leave it
in. Otherwise remove.

Per your suggestion, I'm working on a pair of patches that are:

(a) the previous patch ("minor improvements"), but without the warning. 
git-p4.txt is updated to make it clearer what to expect.

(b) a second patch that puts a warning in the commit template if you are 
going to lose authorship information. The warning is disableable  via 
git-config.

Regards!
Luke