Does Git really need a commit message to go with a commit?

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 3, 2010, 22:06 UTC
Message-ID: <z2r51dd1af81004031506pc9ac1840ie9953ae6df91d01b@mail.gmail.com>

git-commit(1) doesn't allow you to make a commit without a commit message. This is annoying and doesn't properly preserve history in applications like snerp-vortex which replay a SVN dump into Git. You have to add `$msg = "Git made me do it" unless length $msg' somewhere.

Is there really no way to add a commit with no message with the git tools? Will anything break if I manually construct a commit with no message? Are commit messages inherently part of the format or does git-commit(1) just think it knows better than me?

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