Highlights from git 2.42

starman@programming.dev to Programming@programming.dev – 61 points –
Highlights from Git 2.42
github.blog
16

You are viewing a single comment

Maybe there were 78 committers. But other people contributed to the release in some other way (QA?), but that may be more difficult to count than just looking at the commit stats ...

Sorry, I failed to relay my point. When somebody writes over x amount - it's always a rounded number. This smells of either pre-highschool levels of language or some ML generated content.

The author of the blogpost is a developer, not a professional writer. Honestly I don't understand why you're so upset about it.

I'm upset about it because it lacks attention to detail. Language is tricky, but this is an attempt to use an expression without understanding what it is. The obvious choice would've been to not use it and state the numbers plainly.

Perhaps the numbers are not plainly available as the previous commenter stated, and they wanted to call out the direct contribution of the 78 unique commit authors, without disregarding many other indirect contributions from commenters, reviewers, testers etc.

It's perhaps better that patch notes are written by programmers and not linguists. Incorrectly using a (harmless) phrase is perfectly okay. It doesn't detract from the important bits of the announcement at all.

edit: damn, that's a big reaction for an accidental mistake someone wrote in a patch notes highlight article.

The obvious choice would’ve been to not use it and state the numbers plainly.

How would you write it?

The open source Git project just released Git 2.42 with features and bug fixes from 78 contributors, 17 of them new.

There. Simple.

But there were more contributors, you just don't know how many. By this you're kind of disregarding their work.

No there aren't, stop making things up. From the official release notes:

The latest feature release Git v2.42.0 is now available at the
usual places.  It is comprised of 453 non-merge commits since
v2.41.0, contributed by 78 people, 17 of which are new faces

78 people contributed in the form of code commits, but more people likely contributed to the release in other ways (QA, triage, release management etc.)

Fuck me. Can you not read? It is stating specifically features and bug fixes. QA, triage, release management are neither features nor bug fixes. They're processes. They're necessary. But that's a separate thing.

QA of course contributes to the defects and features.

Usually, also people who write in issues or discuss things are counted as contributors, but there it is pretty hard to figure out who contributed to this specific release