On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 11:17:18AM -0400, James Bowes wrote:
>
> Why not?
Convenience and personal preference.
It would not allow me to do git commit -m '...' as it's hard to count
the letters on the command line. I know that if I'm forced to use
50 characters, eventually I'll just use "bug fix" to be on the safe
side. I'll much rather have the first line of the commit message
wrapped / truncated in gitk / gitweb than have politically correct,
50 character first lines that don't describe the commits sufficiently
and make it hard to overview the commits.
> The first line is simply a summary or the topic of the patch.
... or the whole commit message. Especially for small commits,
there is no need to do more than one line.
> You can be
> as verbose as you want in the body of the commit message. It's just like
> an email; you wouldn't put the whole body of the message in the subject.
I personally do not buy the email message analogy (and yes, I know
that's what Linus says ...).
> Frankly, if you can't summarize a change in 50 or so characters (I
> wouldn't place a hard limit, myself), then your change is probably doing
> more than one thing, and should be broken into smaller changes.
$ git cat-file commit fdb8c7c881c17ca0c7899e6bfe03e58502586b52
[...]
Automatic commit of package [spacewalk-setup] release [0.5.27-1].
65 characters.
$ git cat-file commit 66f35d59c2f4d1771e0b17086a5f85f7c151982f
[...]
492194 - call waitpid even if reading PROCESS_OUT did not return eof.
One of the jabberd daemons on Fedora 10 seems not to close its stdout,
so doing just while (<PROCESS_OUT>) blocks forever. Therefor we will
do select'n'sysread, to have a chance to see if the child is ready to
be reaped even if we did not get eof.
69 characters.
$ git cat-file commit 69062132d20311a94893e7f5fef43e7a7166d274
[...]
491687 - label the /usr/bin/rhn-sudo-load-ssl-cert wrapper with
httpd_unconfined_script_exec_t.
95 characters.
None of these can reasonably be split into smaller commits. Yes,
I could make the first line shorter, but it would feel cumbersome
trying to fit perfectly complete 70 or 90 character description to
50 characters, and I'd feel I'd be mostly repeating the same content
in the later lines.
I think that we (myself included) still have lots to improve WRT the
content of the commit messages and that we can address the form
later.
--
Jan Pazdziora
Senior Software Engineer, Satellite Engineering, Red Hat
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