Re: please make the commit log clean

[Chet Ramey]

On 8/18/24 4:45 PM, shynur . wrote:
> Hi, Chet.
>
> I'm a beginner with Bash and recently stumbled upon the
> Bash code repository (specifically the 'devel' branch).
> I noticed that almost every commit includes thousands of
> lines of changes.

Not really.

> Out of curiosity, I randomly clicked on one of the commits
> (e.g., 
> <https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/bash.git/commit/?h=devel&id=772e7e760e8a098e4d8dee21cf11090be4757918>).
> I found that the majority of the changes were to documentation,
> such as the `doc/bash.0` file, which had 4999 lines modified.

I periodically refresh the formatted documentation, since it's part of the
distribution, and try to do it at least every time I make a substantive
change to the man page or info manual.

The same thing happens when I update the translations.

> While I'm not very familiar with the process of automatically
> generating documentation, I can still infer that the `doc/bash.0`
> file is an output produced by processing `doc/bash.info` with
> some program.

It's not, but as you say, it's not familiar to you. Look at doc/Makefile
in the build directory for how make generates the formatted documentation.


> I believe these output files should be added to `.gitignore`
> and generated during the `make` process.  Otherwise, they will
> severely pollute the commit history, making it much harder for
> future maintainers to understand and manage the repository.

There are ways you can ignore these files on your side.

--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/