Re: Make commit messages optional

From: tytso <tytso@mit.edu>
Date: Apr 11, 2022, 18:23 UTC
Message-ID: <YlRyHR5rvG5P/Acr@mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <220411.861qy3khkk.gmgdl@evledraar.gmail.com>

On Mon, Apr 11, 2022 at 12:19:51PM +0200, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

Show 14 quoted lines

> > and the main argument *against* is "for most
> > people (non-advanced users), what you do initially is what you end up
> > pushing, or at least trying to push, and fixing things later is *hard*
> > - it requires a much deeper understanding of git than most people
> > otherwise necessarily need to develop".
> 
> Yes, maybe it won't be viable to go in that direction, but re this in my
> [1]:
> 	
> 	But I'm also pretty sure that those people are engaged in a proxy war,
> 	and we should just attack the "problem" directly instead. I.e. it's not
> 	a problem that some commit somewhere has an empty message, rather it's
> 	that such a commit gets "propagated". A better place to check for it is
> 	then at the point of point of propagation.

So possible options we could consider:

1) Do nothing.  If users want to override the current behavior they
can just put in their .git/config or ~/.gitconfig file:

[alias]
   commit = commit --allow-empty-message

2) Add some kind of explicit git-config option which could then be
added to their .git/config or ~/.gitconfig:

[commit]
   allow-empty-description = true

3) Change the default, so that --allow-empty-message is always
implied, and hope that novices can figure out git rebase -i without
shooting themselves in the foot.

4) Enforce git push doesn't push commits with empty commits,
implemented on the client side.  This could be implemented via a
pre-push hook script.

5)  Enforce git push doesn't push commits with empty commits,
implemented on the server side.This could be implemented via a
pre-receive hook script.

I will note that only options 2 and 3 require source code changes to git. The rest can effectively be done via config file changes; for the hook files, we could provide example scripts to make it easier for people to choose that particular option.

And of these options, only one option, #3, requires imposing someone's preference (which does appear to be in the minority) on everyone else.

						- Ted