this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2025
7 points (88.9% liked)
Git
3922 readers
1 users here now
Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
Resources
Rules
- Follow programming.dev rules
- Be excellent to each other, no hostility towards users for any reason
- No spam of tools/companies/advertisements. It’s OK to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the community should not be self-promotion.
Git Logo by Jason Long is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
honestly, i hate having a form for my coworkers to fill out. i’ve done it before. i’ve seen it done. i prefer my collaborators, especially in a work environment to do the professional thing and give me enough context to understand the change. i don’t want to have to treat my coworkers like half interested children, but that temptation is always there. a bunch of “did you do your homework?” check boxes feels condescending by proxy. we don’t need a check box for “are the tests passing?” cuz we have automated tests and CI.
i prefer something that just nudges people in the right direction if i can get away with it.
just this week i added a template that read like:
I know what you mean. Quite often when I've worked in a project where there is a pull request template, a lot of the time people don't bother to fill it out. However, in an ideal world, people would be proud of the work that they've delivered, and take the time to describe the changes when raising a pull request.
You aren't treating them like children. That's just projection because you know what you want from a PR and feel like someone telling you what they want is belittling you. Not everybody wants the same nor has the same expectations from a PR.
Guidelines and rules exist for this very reason: people are different. Adding a CONTRIBUTING.md isn't treating somebody like a child and PR templates neither.
the CONTRIBUTING.md document has always existed and contains our guidelines. they know what we’ve agreed upon belongs in a PR, and they simply don’t do it. i’d rather have an empty description than a big stupid ignored form template, because the problem isn’t they don’t know but that they don’t care. that’s a problem that forms, in my experience, don’t fix.
If your colleagues cannot follow guidelines, do not have the common sense to add a description, and completely ignore a form, I think you have a much bigger problem on your hands.
@chrash0 @onlinepersona That's a thing I got told back in university: Technology cannot solve social problems (which is quite frustrating, at least in this case...)