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Re: Question about commit message wrapping

From
HHHolger Hellmuth <hellmuth@ira.uka.de>
Date
Dec 12, 2011, 16:37 UTC
Message-ID
<4EE62DB9.8030406@ira.uka.de>
In-Reply-To
<CAH6sp9NwyxZi6KR4U96=sWdiqCseyTLEDoHdw=y9hUx2kHwOpg@mail.gmail.com>
On 12.12.2011 09:41, Frans Klaver wrote:
Show 5 quoted lines
>> Emails on this list are almost exclusively sent pre-wrapped to 80
>> character line lengths.
>> The result is exactly the kind of ragged output you used in your
>> example. Changing this behaviour may break backwards compatibility,
>> but it is already broken for 'future' compatibility.

I don't really see backwards compatibility broken either. At the moment commit messages are usually pre-wrapped at 72 columns, which looks perfect only on 80 column displays, ok on wider displays and bad on narrow displays.

If the requirement to pre-wrap would fall and either 'git log' or 'less' doing the wrap, old commit messages would still look perfect on 80 column, ok on wider and bad on narrow displays. Newer commit messages would look good everywhere.

The only breakage would be that new long commit messages would look bad on older git versions. Because of that the auto-wrap should be implemented first and the "requirement" for 72 columns should fall in a later version.

> I am starting to think that we need to somehow keep the current
> behavior, but override at smaller widths. Maybe even use format=flowed
> in format-patch.

Could you explain what overriding at smaller widths would achieve? Supporting format=flowed would be nice though.

> On the other hand, the fundamental use with git is to
> communicate code, and I'm not sure how that [cw]ould be handled.

I prefer wrapped code to code that is cut of at a specific column. Wrapped code has much less possibility for misinterpretation. Python programmers might disagree?

I see your proposal mainly as an improvement to the display of texts, not code.

Previous: Frans KlaverNext: Frans Klaver
Message 13 of 21 in “Question about commit message wrapping”
  1. Sidney San MartínDec 9, 2011
  2. Frans KlaverDec 9, 2011
  3. Frans KlaverDec 9, 2011
  4. Sidney San MartínDec 9, 2011
  5. Frans KlaverDec 9, 2011
  6. Sidney San MartínDec 9, 2011
  7. Andreas SchwabDec 10, 2011
  8. Jakub NarebskiDec 9, 2011
  9. Sidney San MartínDec 9, 2011
  10. Jakub NarebskiDec 10, 2011
  11. Andrew ArdillDec 11, 2011
  12. Frans KlaverDec 12, 2011
  13. Holger HellmuthDec 12, 2011
  14. Frans KlaverDec 12, 2011
  15. Michael HaggertyDec 13, 2011
  16. Frans KlaverDec 13, 2011
  17. Holger HellmuthDec 13, 2011
  18. Sidney San MartínDec 14, 2011
  19. Drew NorthupJan 1, 2012
  20. Sidney San MartínJan 26, 2012
  21. Sidney San MartínDec 14, 2011

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