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 :)
