On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 4:12 AM, Pieter de Bie <[email protected]> wrote:
> The problem is that some people put code in the message so it needs to > keep it's formatting. > > Exactly. The fixed width, no wrapping text is on purpose. People > should wrap lines themselves, other stuff like long code lines get > wrapped in a weird way. The fixe width font is used so that ASCII art > graphs still work. Okay, I'm inclined to pretty strongly disagree with this. I would argue that a commit message, by definition, should contain a message. Not code, not ASCII art, but a descriptive message explaining the commit. If something requires documentation, commit messages aren't really the appropriate place for it. In other words, graphs belong in the documentation where people can find them and code belongs in code files. Just to be sure I wasn't misunderstanding some part of the Git culture, I took a peek at the Git repo, the Rails repo and a handful of Mac repos and over the last 100 or so commits in each of them, found not a single example of code or ASCII art. I also scanned through the entire history of GitX and again, no examples. The only real guideline offered by the documentation is the commit 'title' convention. After that, the docs state, "The commit log messages are uninterpreted sequences of non-NUL bytes." That does not imply formatting. So I'd make the argument that by enforcing a false set of rules like this we are serving the few at the expense of the many. Kevin
