Re:My favourite Git commit (2019)
by bassdigit on Sunday March 08, 2020 @03:26PM
(#22519961)
The author spent all the time documenting his journey but totally fails to explain the actual reason of the problem: If the file contains a UTF-8 byte sequence, why is there an attempt to parse it as US-ASCII? I get that it's just a wrong space, but if some day somebody actually want to put a UTF-8 char there for some reason, this commit essay wouldn't help at all whereas googling stackoverflow seems to deliver (unverified):
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15947425/rake-tasks-fail...
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Following this thought, it could be argued that the author did not even fix the problem, only eliminated a symptom of the underlying, serious configuration mistake that restricts file contents to an outdated character encoding.
I like your approach. And the blogpost's author does not even hint that the story told could mask an underlying issue at all. Which I find mind boggling somehow, but can we call this symptom whack-a-mole and what can be interpreted as anxiety-driven reasoning a cultural issue? Or is there a different, broader context that can wrap this up better that I'm not seeing?
The commit message succeeds in justifying the effort but lacks an in-depth understanding of the related mechanics. I can imagine the developer felt bad about 'only' committing a one character change at the end of the day and wrote the message to make up for it. Because of this un-economic outcome, he hesitated to dig deeper.
There is no reason to feel bad.
The cultural issue is bad management that still evaluates developers by lines of code / commit activity.
I'm not a ruby developer but the actual problem seems to be the default file encoding.
There is a detailed blog post[1] about it, adding a lot more to understanding what's happening. More than a blog post about how a diary entry as a commit message made somebody feel.
[1]: http://graysoftinc.com/character-encodings/ruby-19s-three-de...