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[the structure of a log message]

The usual way to compose a log message of this project is to

 - Give an observation on how the current system work in the present
   tense (so no need to say "Currently X is Y", just "X is Y"), and
   discuss what you perceive as a problem in it.

 - Propose a solution (optional---often, problem description
   trivially leads to an obvious solution in reader's minds).

 - Give commands to the codebase to "become like so".

in this order.

To those who have been intimately following the discussion, it often
is understandable without some of the above, but we are not writing
for those who review the patches.  We are primarily writing for future
readers of "git log" who are not aware of the review discussion we
have on list, so we should give something to prepare them by setting
the stage and stating the objective first, before going into how the
patch solved it.

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[polish your history before sending]

We frown upon a patch series that makes mistakes in an earlier step,
only to fix them in a later step.  The "git rebase -i" command helps
us pretend to be more perfect developers than we actually are,
whipping your patch series into a shape that builds one small step
on top of another in a logical succession.  Such a patch series is
easier to understand than a history that faithfully records all the
stumbles the developer made until they reached the final solution.

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[not just respond, update the patches]

Not limited to this one, but when a reviewer says "this is not
clear", it is often not a request to only clarify something, which
is clear to any intelligent user of the end product, to a clueless
reviewer, whose intelligence is below the target audience, in an
e-mail response.  It is pointing out that the end product, either the
patch text or the proposed log message, is not clear to target
audience and needs update.

We would expect a review comment to be at least responded to either
rebut or admit the issues raised.  It may be that a reviewer's point
were missing the mark and the patches themselves were perfectly
fine.

But all other cases, even when the reviewer's comment were missing
the mark, such a confusion may have been the result of the patch
text or the proposed log message being unclear.  Of course, the
review comments may have been pointing out an actionable issue.
They would hopefully lead to an improved version of the patches
posted sometime later, so that we can conclude a topic and move
ahead.
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[make us come to you, begging]

I've seen from time to time people ask "I am thinking of doing this;
will a patch be accepted?  If so, I'll work on it." before showing
any work, and my response always has been:

 (1) We don't know how useful and interesting your contribution would
     be for our audience, until we see it; and

 (2) If you truly believe in your work (find it useful, find writing
     it fun, etc.), that would be incentive enough for you to work
     on it, whether or not the result will land in my tree.  You
     should instead aim for something so brilliant that we would
     come to you begging for your permission to include it in our
     project.

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[mailing list is the primary place]

One thing to note is that I do not respond to a pull request in private,
and Github pull request, as I understand it, is very private in nature.
The patches are to be reviewed on the main mailing list first.

It's OK to say "these patches are also available in my repository at
Github whose URL is this" in the commentary part of the final submission
message after the list reaches consensus that your change is a good thing,
and that may reduce the chance of mistakes when I accept the patches
especially if the series is large, so I am not saying that repositories
people have Github have no value to my workflow.  But it will not come
into the picture before the final submission phase.

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[going incremental after hitting next]

Once a commit hits 'next', it gets improved only by piling incremental
updates on top with explanation.  The idea is: if all of us thought it
has seen enough eyeballs and is good enough for 'next', yet we later
find there was something we all missed, that is worth a separate
explanation, e.g., "The primary motivation behind the series is still
good, but for such and such reasons we missed this case we are
fixing."

Unless it turns out that the approach was fundamentally wrong and such
an incremental update boils down to almost reverting the earlier one
entirely and replacing it with the newer one.  In such a case, we do
revert the earlier and replace it with the newer, in 'next'.

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