Git Commit Messages: 50/72 Formatting

Question

Tim Pope argues for a particular Git commit message style in his blog post: http://www.tpope.net/node/106.

Here is a quick summary of what he recommends:

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Answer 1

I'd agree it is interesting to propose a particular style of working. However, unless I have the chance to set the style, I usually follow what's been done for consistency.

Taking a look at the Linux Kernel Commits, the project that started git if you like, http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commit;h=bca476139d2ded86be146dae09b06e22548b67f3, they don't follow the 50/72 rule. The first line is 54 characters.

I would say consistency matters. Set up proper means of identifying users who've made commits (user.name, user.email - especially on internal networks. User@OFFICE-1-PC-10293982811111 isn't a useful contact address). Depending on the project, make the appropriate detail available in the commit. It's hard to say what that should be; it might be tasks completed in a development process, then details of what's changed.

I don't believe users should use git one way because certain interfaces to git treat the commits in certain ways.

I should also note there are other ways to find commits. For a start, git diff will tell you what's changed. You can also do things like git log --pretty=format:'%T %cN %ce' to format the options of git log.