[coreboot] links in commit messages: don't do it.

ron minnich rminnich at gmail.com
Tue Oct 15 23:16:54 CEST 2013


Since I have to deal with bad URLs on a daily basis, and just hit
another one yesterday in a different repo, sorry, my opinion on this
isn't up for changing. I actually thought (a long time ago) as you do
now, but my experience with URLs is not that happy. Sorry. I expect
that URLs will continue to make it into the repo one way or another,
but I will continue to oppose such practice.

Committ messages are archival. At some point, when the Web was new,
people would put URLs in citations (me included). That practice has
started to come under fire in the archival literature due to the stale
link problem. What we did when the Web was new is not necessarily what
we do today. Few people in the 1990s anticipated the scale of the web
as it is today. It's far more useful to put a searchable string
(rocket systems 1984 superio with platinum thrusters) than a URL which
will almost certainly be bad in a few years.

But if you're going to dump a URL in a commit message, for goodness
sake, at least have it point at something other than a form!

ron



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