On Thursday 2017-03-09 13:35 -0800, Eric Rescorla wrote: > I'm in favor of good commit messages, but I would note that current m-c > convention really pushes against this, because people seem to feel that > commit messages should be one line. Not sure what to do about that, > but thought I would mention it.
In Mercurial, the first line of the commit message has different semantics from the rest of the lines, in that some tools display only the first line of the commit message and not the whole message. This is true of "hg log" (without -v), and also of a bunch of the tools we have that look at Mercurial commits (e.g., treeherder). (I'm not sure if this is true for any git tools, though.) So the style I want people to use is making the first line be a summary description of what's being changed (probably 60-120 characters, without wrapping), and then (when needed, which is a significant portion of the time) explaining in more detail in later wrapped lines. I think there are a decent number of commits in m-c that do use multi-line commit messages (although not as many as I like), but many of the tools that show lists of commits hide all but the first line (as I think they should, for summary views). An old example of this that I like is this commit: https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/830111e10951 -David -- 𝄞 L. David Baron http://dbaron.org/ 𝄂 𝄢 Mozilla https://www.mozilla.org/ 𝄂 Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense. - Robert Frost, Mending Wall (1914)
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