Seems like some good improvements to internals about which I’m not a strong enough programmer to understand.
features and bug fixes from over 78 contributors
Is it 79, then? Can’t even force myself to read this any further. Can someone from github of all places, please hire a writer who can actually write?
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.
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