Re: [PATCH] SubmittingPatches: Cite the 50 char subject limit

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jul 28, 2010, 17:23 UTC
Message-ID: <7vzkxb4j1v.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <1280326285-10203-1-git-send-email-avarab@gmail.com>

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> writes:

Show 5 quoted lines

> Change the SubmittingPatches recommendations to mention the 50
> character soft limit on patch subject lines. 50 characters is the soft
> limit mentioned in git-commit(1) and gittutorial(7), it's also the
> point at which Gitweb, GitHub and various other Git front ends start
> abbreviating the commit message.

Hmph, we probably would want to do s/50 character/&s/ in the two manual pages. I do not think if anybody is ready to stand behind the specific number "50", and we can bikeshed about it separately.

The spirit of having a soft limit is twofold:

 - It should fit on "git log --oneline" comfortably;

 - If your change is too complex to be summarized in such a short
   sentence, you probably are doing too many things in one commit.

The first does not justify "50" any better than other arbitrary limit, but with things like --graph and --source, anything longer makes the resulting output very close to the edge of an 80-column terminal.

The second does not justify "50" either, as your language may be verbose or terse (e.g. Japanese can cram far more information in a 140-char tweet than somebody writing in English), but it is a more important one between the two rationales above.