Re: Make commit messages optional

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 11, 2022, 10:24 UTC
Message-ID: <220411.865ynfkj7r.gmgdl@evledraar.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CA+JQ7M-uSatD4=HHxaqe4yVAJ5WGuWC_BprX4hnfKSrt6-1GEg@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, Apr 08 2022, Erik Cervin Edin wrote:

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> At the risk of bikeshedding.
>
> The case in favor of not allowing empty commit messages by default is
> that most of the time, empty commit messages are useless.
>
> I've written my fair share of poor commit messages (-,..., wip, foo).
> Sometimes I've fixed that retroactively, sometimes not. The advantage
> I see with empty commit messages is that it's more ubiquitous to
> "write something better" or "whatever". The downside is I can't git
> log --grep '^$' to find them.

You can:

    git log --invert-grep --grep '.'

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> On Fri, Apr 8, 2022 at 7:47 PM Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> wrote:
>> E.g. I wouldn't mind if we made pushes start failing (probably guarded
>> by appropriate isatty() checks) if the user was pushing content without
>> commit messages, unless some option were overridden, or we could start
>> sternly warning about that. Ditto for merging a branch into another one
>> (especially if we can see it's the default branch).
>
> I could see this being a potentially nice option but also pretty much
> .git/hooks/pre-push.sample but with rev-list --grep '^$'  (which
> doesn't appear to work)

The reason it doesn't work is that our --grep doesn't allow for matching across the whole message, we should fix that, it would be useful in other contexts.

But for this the --invert-grep above will do what you want. I.e. if our --grep matches any one character and we discard any that matched with --invert-grep we're left with empty commit messages.