Open Stack

On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 10:50:18PM +0100, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> 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%.

100% agreed with all this. Using a period at the end of line is
completely pointless. In absence of any explicit hacking rules
to the contrary, commit messages first line should be treated
in the same way as email subject line. No one ever uses a period
in the email subject line.

> 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.

Yep, I never even considered that anyone would ever want to use a
period at the end of a commit message first line, so never thought
to explicit tell anyone not to.

Daniel
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