On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 7:09 AM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
I am also concerned about demotivating people.
The motivation factor works with the two positions.
I felt a little demotivated after having read all these "we don't care about typos" positions at the start of the thread and felt really relieved to read this is not the consensus opinion.
Especially, as, in September and October, when I weren't at ease with my -1 typo reviews, I mailed four people I reviewed their change such a way to ask them what they prefer: a -1 review or a new patchset fixing the typo directly (I weren't at ease with the idea to resubmit a patchset without prior author consent either). Three of them didn't bother to answer me at all (for the anecdote, the 4th preferred a -1 review). So we quit the realm of "the workflow and the UI don't allow easy correction" to enter into the realm of "we don't care".
On a side matter, typos could be a symptom of another issue: how important a commit message is? Should it be a formality to expedite in 30 seconds or an informative valuable text describing the change, crafted with care and proofread before submission or merge? What's the goal of a commit message as a changelog, communication tool and change documentation value?
At the end, the direct commit message edit in the UI will offer an acceptable solution: corrections will be more trivial than found again my branch, amend the commit, resubmit as a new patchset. Meanwhile, we can suffer the last weeks of extra work for review spelling (as 0 or -1) purpose pending the Gerrit migration.
And if you don't want to fix yourselves your commit, please create a list stating so on mediawiki.org, that will be a clear message for the code reviewers: "If you see a typo, would you be so kind as to fix it yourself and submit a new patchset?".