On 05/09/2011 03:17 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote: > On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 11:36 AM, Ned Batchelder <n...@nedbatchelder.com> > wrote: >> On 5/9/2011 1:24 PM, Terry Reedy wrote: >>> >>> A commit (push) partition time and behavior into before and after (with a >>> short change period in between during which behavior is undefined). >>> >>> Some commit messages have the form 'x does y'. Does 'does' mean before or >>> after? Sometimes that is clear. 'x crashes' means before. 'x return correct >>> value' means after. But some messages of this type are unclear to me as >>> written. >>> >>> Consider 'x raises exception'? The temporal reference is obvious to the >>> committer but not necessary to everyone else. It could mean 'x used to >>> segfault and now raises a catchable exception'. There was a fix like this >>> (with a clear message) just today. It could also mean 'x used to raise but >>> now return an answer. There have been many fixes like this. >>> >>> Two minimal fixes are 'x raised exception' or 'make x raise exception'. >>> >> I've always favored "X now properly raises an exception." > > While my own preference is "make X properly raise an exception" I'm > happy with any of the alternatives proposed here, and grateful to > Terry for calling this out. Checkin comments of the form "X does Y" > are ambiguous and confusing. (Same for feature requests in the > tracker.) > > I'm curious where the habit to use the present tense comes from; I > wonder if it originates in some agile development practice? >
Thanks indeed for bringing this up, Terry. It's been on my to-do list for a while. I think it comes from just copying the title of a bug report. The bug is "X does Y", and that's what's used in the fix. Eric. _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
