linux-kernel - Re: [GIT PULL afs: Development for 5.4

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Date:   Wed, 18 Sep 2019 17:22:54 -0700
From:   Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
To:     David Howells <dhowells@...hat.com>
Cc:     YueHaibing <yuehaibing@...wei.com>,
        Marc Dionne <marc.dionne@...istor.com>,
        linux-afs@...ts.infradead.org,
        linux-fsdevel <linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [GIT PULL afs: Development for 5.4

On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 4:09 AM David Howells <dhowells@...hat.com> wrote:
>
> Here's a set of patches for AFS.  The first three are trivial, deleting
> unused symbols and rolling out a wrapper function.

Pulled.

However, I was close to unpulling it again. It has a merge commit with
this merge message:

    Merge remote-tracking branch 'net/master' into afs-next

and that simply is not acceptable.

Commit messages need to explain the commit. The same is even more true
of merges!

In a regular commit, you can at least look at the patch and say "ok,
that  change is obvious and self-explanatory".

In a merge commit, the _only_ explanation you have is basically the
commit message, and when the commit message is garbage, the merge is
garbage.

If you can't explain why you are doing a merge, then you shouldn't do
the merge. It's that simple.

And if you can't be bothered to write the explanation down, I'm not
sure I can be bothered to then pull the end result.

             Linus