From: Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 15 May 2025 10:19:38 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH] sequencer: make it clearer that commit descriptions are just comments
Message-ID: <177e43a6-6086-4e20-8ba3-6b84e7025fc2@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <40c32d33-b170-4319-ba1b-b93dcb2b23cf@crinan.ddns.net>

Sorry I forgot to Cc the original author in the message below.

On 15/05/2025 11:16, Phillip Wood wrote:
> Hi Reto
> 
> On 15/05/2025 05:42, Reto wrote:
>> On Thu, May 15, 2025 at 02:20:27AM +0000, Elijah Newren via 
>> GitGitGadget wrote:
>>
>>> It may be difficult to correct users' poor commit messages, but we can
>>> at least try to make it clearer that the commit summaries are not
>>> directives of some sort by inserting a comment character.  Hopefully
>>> that leads to them looking a little further and noticing the hints at
>>> the bottom to use 'reword' or 'edit' directives.
>>
>> For fancy things/editors that recognize comments, this will *dim* the 
>> commit
>> messages, to light grey or such.
>> This is decidedly not what I'd like to happen at least. The commit 
>> messages
>> there are my primary way of navigating the commit, given that I'm not 
>> learning
>> the commit shas by hard ;)
> 
> As the commit message makes clear we already insert a '#' between the 
> parents and subject line of a merge command. We also append '# empty' to 
> empty commits. If there are editors that erroneously treat a '#' 
> anywhere in the line as a comment they're already dimming things they 
> shouldn't. A line in the todo list is only a comment if it starts with 
> core.commentString which defaults to '#'. Editors that unconditionally 
> treat '#' as the start of a comment are buggy.
> 
>> While I appreciate the motivation, I don't think the comment string is a
>> good approach here.
> 
> As the commit message points out strictly speaking we're not using the 
> comment string we using a fixed single character.
> 
> Best Wishes
> 
> Phillip
>