Re: Is this a bug?

From: Duy Nguyen <pclouds@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 19, 2013, 11:02 UTC
Message-ID: <CACsJy8DjatRbL=J-MZmQFnd+_7i-WwYHSnkY_ga++fx1R5Whmw@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CABPQNSY4ordHh2ee8mk-2kCD40+sMf_SxrjfzGbkyGGTNW1TzA@mail.gmail.com>

On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 4:47 PM, Erik Faye-Lund <kusmabite@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 10:32 AM, David Wade <DAWAD@statoil.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I wrote a commit message beginning with a hash (#) character, like this: 'git commit -m "#ifdef ...." '
>>
>> Everything went okay when committing, but then I tried 'git commit -amend' and without editing the commit message I was told I had an empty commit message.
>>
>> Is this a problem with my text editor (vim 7.2) or git itself? (git version 1.7.2.2 under RedHat 5.8) Or something I'm not supposed to do ;-) ?
>
> The problem is that when doing interactive editing of messages (like
> 'git commit --amend' does), git considers '#' as a comment-character.
> You can disable this by using the --cleanup=verbatim switch (or some
> other suiting cleanup-setting, see 'git help commit').

Nobody is always conscious about the leading # in commit message to do that. I once edited a commit message and the auto-wrap feature put '#' at the beginning of the line. I saved and went on without noticing one line was lost until much later :( Perhaps we should change the comment signature a bit to reduce accidents, like only recognize '#' lines as comments after a special line like

# this is not a comment ### START OF COMMENT ### # this is a comment

-- 
Duy