Re: Making a patch: "git format-patch" does not produce the documented format

From: John Keeping <john@keeping.me.uk>
Date: Jul 31, 2013, 21:48 UTC
Message-ID: <20130731214818.GP2337@serenity.lan>
In-Reply-To: <201307312131.r6VLVliK028321@hobgoblin.ariadne.com>

On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 05:31:47PM -0400, Dale R. Worley wrote:

Show 30 quoted lines

> Notice that the whole commit message has been formatted as if it is
> part of the Subject line, and the line breaks in the commit message
> have been refilled.
> 
> The file Documentation/SubmittingPatches says that "git format-patch"
> produces patches in the best format, but the manual page shows an
> example more like this:
> 
>     From 8f72bad1baf19a53459661343e21d6491c3908d3 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
>     From: Tony Luck <tony.luck@intel.com>
>     Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2010 11:42:54 -0700
>     Subject: [PATCH] Put ia64 config files on the
>     MIME-Version: 1.0
>     Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>     Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
> 
>     arch/arm config files were slimmed down using a python script
>     (See commit c2330e286f68f1c408b4aa6515ba49d57f05beae comment)
>     [...]
> 
> That is, the first line of the commit message is in the Subject and
> the remaining lines are in the message body.  As far as I can tell,
> that's what SubmittingPatches prescribes.  And that is what I see in
> the Git mailing list on vger.
> 
> (This is with git 1.8.3.3.)
> 
> Exactly how should the commit message be inserted into the patch
> e-mail?  What needs to be updated so the code is consistent with the
> documentation?

git-format-patch(1) says:

        By default, the subject of a single patch is "[PATCH] " followed
        by the concatenation of lines from the commit message up to the
        first blank line (see the DISCUSSION section of git-commit(1)).

I think that accurately describes what you're seeing. The referenced DISCUSSION section describes how to write a commit message that is formatted in a suitable way, with a short first subject line and then a blank line before the body of the message.