From: Junio C Hamano Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2010 17:23:24 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH] SubmittingPatches: Cite the 50 char subject limit Message-ID: <7vzkxb4j1v.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org> In-Reply-To: <1280326285-10203-1-git-send-email-avarab@gmail.com> Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason writes: > 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.