Re: Wrap commit messages on `git commit -m`

From: Tay Ray Chuan <rctay89@gmail.com>
Date: Nov 4, 2012, 07:27 UTC
Message-ID: <CALUzUxrdCw6nPLzeLHij+CjHsPO3w=e0nUdjBL=P7rqJtZ+t3A@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <m3a9v170ca.fsf@black.gullik.net>

On Thu, Nov 1, 2012 at 11:29 AM, Lars Gullik Bjønnes <larsbj@gullik.org> wrote:

Show 20 quoted lines

> Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com> writes:
>
> | Hi,
>>
> | Some of my colleagues are lazy to fire up an editor and write proper
> | commit messages- they often write one-liners using `git commit -m`.
> | However, that line turns out to be longer than 72 characters, and the
> | resulting `git log` output is ugly.  So, I was wondering if it would
> | be a good idea to wrap these one-liners to 72 characters
> | automatically.
>
> git commit -m 'foo: fix this problem
>
> This problem is fixed by doing foo,
> bar and baz.
>
> Signed-off-by: me
> '
>
> works.

Perhaps a deeper issue is that the implicit email format (subject-body) for commit messages, is, well, implicit. New users of git who type git-commit -m '...' isn't going to know that those few characters will all be lumped on a "subject" line, forever screwing themselves when they review the output of git-log, git-rebase --interactive, etc. (can't remember off the top of my head if git-format-patch would chop off long subjects and move it to the body), which may be a significant period of time (and thus commits) later.

While I don't have any ideas on how to improve on this, hopefully this gets recognized as an issue in the first place.

-- 
Cheers,
Ray Chuan