Re: [PATCH 4/9] hook: treat hookdir hook specially

Eric Sunshine wrote:

On Fri, Jul 23, 2021 at 1:34 PM Felipe Contreras
[off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Emily Shaffer wrote:

quoted

On Fri, Jul 16, 2021 at 10:58:34AM +0200, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

quoted

At this point I tihnk it would be way better to squash this and other
such changes that basically add a field to a struct that isn't used yet
into whatever commit use/need them.

I think at this point we run into you and me having different
patch-storytelling styles - which probably is what led to the big topic
restart in the first place ;)

Yes, but as a reader of the story I prefer not to have to read the
entire thing in order to understand it. I prefer each page to tell a
small story.

Putting my armchair reviewer hat I cannot do that for this particular
patch, I would need to do more work to make sense of it, and while I'm
writing this message to explains that, others will simply skip it, and
that's a lost opportunity.

Implicit in what Felipe and Ævar are saying is that a well-structured
patch series asks the reviewer to keep only one or two details in mind
after reading a patch in order to understand the next patch in the
series, and that the reviewer shouldn't be expected to keep a large
set of details in mind over several patches. Unlike the author of the
patches who can keep all the details in mind at once and understands
the series in its entirety, reviewers (usually) don't have such
luxury[1]. So, it's important to hand-hold reviewers as much as
possible by not asking them to remember a lot of details between
patches and by ensuring that the details which they must remember only
need to be remembered for a very short time. This is why it is
helpful, for instance, to bundle documentation and test updates in the
patch with changes to code, so the reviewer can see at a glance that
the changes to documentation and tests match the changes to the code,
rather than delaying documentation and test updates until later in the
series.

Another important point is that while as a patch author it's natural to
push back against possibly unnecessary changes because it would require
considerably more work, there's a reason why writers sometimes chose to
rewrite entire chapters, and it's because every effort to improve the
text as an author would be translated into less effort for the
potentially millions of readers.

It's a multiplicative effect.

Sure, programmers don't have millions of readers, but I think it makes
sense to do 2x the effort as a patch author to receive 4x the review
(at least).

Cheers.

-- 
Felipe Contreras