Re: pkgsrc Commit Message Policy

[Thomas Klausner <wiz%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On Mon, Sep 18, 2017 at 12:40:39PM -0500, J. Lewis Muir wrote:
> I'm not against a limit of 65 characters, but I am curious, would you
> mind sharing the rationale behind it?  For example, maybe the initial
> idea of 50 characters came from Tim Pope's "A Note About Git Commit
> Messages" [1] blog post?

Not that particular post, but a quite similar one.

> The rationale there seems to be that the
> commit summary is used in various parts of Git output, and so a short
> length for the summary makes that output look nicer by avoiding wrapping
> or truncating.  With the pkgsrc-pmc guideline to include the name of the
> package in the commit message if the commit is for a single package,
> maybe a concern was that 50 characters could be challenging when the
> package name eats up part of that right off the bat?  Again, just
> curious.

Exactly.

65 is a compromise. One aim is to have git log --oneline (and hg and
other equivalents) look ok in a 80-character wide xterm (the default
we've been using in other places, like /usr/share/misc/style). Also a
quite popular git hosting seems to have 67 or so as limit.

Cheers,
 Thomas