May I draw your attention to a new section that has been added to our reference guide on how to submit patches by Sean Busbey and Mighty Misty: http://hbase.apache.org/book.html#submitting.patches
It is a nice write-up on how to do patch generation; following the suggestions you can format your own commit message and on the other side, the committers job is made a little easier and less prone to error. Some of you are already doing as suggested but if you tend toward making-it-up-as-you-go-along, as is my bent, I suggest you give it a read. Yours, St.Ack
