Hey, Pulling this out of gerrit for discussion.
Background is one of my patches to diskimage-builder was -1ed because I terminated the title line of the commit message with a period: https://review.openstack.org/33262 This is actually the exact opposite to what I consider normal practice for git commit messages as I explained in the review and the tripleo wiki page, so I proposed a hacking change here: https://review.openstack.org/33789 The rationale for *not* having a period is: * With the 50 char limit, space is at a premium on the first line * The first line is often used as the Subject: in [PATCH] emails - subject lines in emails generally don't end in a period * Examples in: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/GitCommitMessages#Summary_of_GIT_commit_message_structure don't end in period (Note - the "should not end with a period" was only added by me recently) * Another common reference on git commit messages http://tbaggery.com/2008/04/19/a-note-about-git-commit-messages.html doesn't either * In git's own git repo, 1.43% of commit messages in the last year ended in a period * I'm not aware of any other OpenStack project which enforces this. Looking at the history of various projects for the past year (and excluding merge commits which don't end with a period), the use of period termination runs at between 10 and 30%. Unlike other nitpicking I tend to do with commit messages, I previously never thought this was worth even mentioning to committers but if some reviewers were going to start -1ing people for the *correct* style then I figured it was best to clear it up. Now, for Robert's comments in the review: > It would have been nice for this to be discussed rather than dropping > into the communal standards without warning; I tried my best do explain why period termination is broken in the diskimage-builder review and wiki page, so it's not like I was trying to avoid a discussion. In any case, if I, jogo and sdague got this wrong somehow, the mistake is only a git-revert away from being corrected. > the prior documentation *did not* require a period, Yes, but the examples didn't use a period which obviously means a policy to *require* a period is a bit bizarre. I'm pretty confident that danpb didn't mention this when he wrote the page because he either felt it was obvious or not worth mentioning. I've cc-ed him to be sure. > and the reference that was sourced that > doesn't use them is one in the git-via-email world which is not how > OpenStack does *any* of it's git communications, so the 'gets used > like subject line of emails' point is entirely irrelevant. git was born came from a git-via-email world and its usage conventions reflect that. I raised the subject line point to try and explain how git conventions may have arisen. > In TripleO we have been using a period because the first line of the > commit message acts like the first line of a docstring: it is a pithy > description of the object it describes. Docstrings are also space > limited, and yet PEP8 happily requires good sentence structure and > grammar there. It's not a docstring, though. It's a git commit message. > tl;dr - this is an unpythonic change, and the lack of discussion is > quite annoying. Well, the former point is irrelevant and hopefully this email corrects the latter point :) Cheers, Mark. _______________________________________________ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev