On 19/12/2013 14:30, Quoth Niall Douglas:
I think Linus is mostly annoyed that there isn't a toggle for an advanced pull request UI for github, because with very little extra work (a few extra form fields with the signer etc) you'd be a lot closer to good enough.
That's true. And Boost might be at a scale where it will want to use signed commits (though personally I think that attributing it to the maintainer who finally pushes it is probably sufficient, since presumably they're well-known and are warranting a change as tested and/or approved -- and should know how to find the original submitter if not self-generated).
And about the word wrapping, he's just *wrong*. :)
I get his point about not being able to easily mix up commentary (72 char wrap) with source code quotes (no wrap). A lot of github issues I see contain patches which are utterly useless after github has mangled them. Why github so mangles text in so many inconsistent ways depending on which part of github you're in I really don't get, and on that I definitely agree with Linus.
The solution there is to simply not wrap commentary at all. 72 char wrap is arbitrary and completely wrong in most cases other than Ye Olde Terminal Window (and sometimes even there). Wrapping should only occur at the very last UA presentation level and not be preserved when submitting. (Which is NOT the same thing as stripping or reconstructing newlines, which is worse.) This does require something in the editor itself to indicate which lines are code lines and not supposed to be wrapped at all, but most editors and/or markup formats have some way to indicate that. Even in email, which is hard-word-wrapped by convention, there are standards to indicate which newlines are soft and which are hard, such as format=flowed, where [SP][NL] indicates a soft newline that should be removed by the UA and allowed to word-wrap. Though he's right that GitHub's web-based editor doesn't seem to support that for the commit message itself, despite supporting it for the actual file edits. But it's not hard to manually wrap code to keep it readable, leaving commentary to auto-wrap. (And it's fairly rare to put code in the commit message anyway, isn't it?)