Re: [PATCH] sequencer: make it clearer that commit descriptions are just comments

From: Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com>
Date: May 15, 2025, 10:16 UTC
Message-ID: <40c32d33-b170-4319-ba1b-b93dcb2b23cf@crinan.ddns.net>
In-Reply-To: <5voz3jolpff7wbs5yg7jvz5dt7omcikhna7j7646veagr63quv@kkxhzxxf4uf2>

Hi Reto

On 15/05/2025 05:42, Reto wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> 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