Open Stack

Excerpts from Christopher Yeoh's message of 2014-06-22 18:46:59 -0700:
> On Mon, Jun 23, 2014 at 4:43 AM, Jay Pipes <jaypipes at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > On 06/22/2014 09:41 AM, Amrith Kumar wrote:
> >
> >> In addition to making changes to the hacking rules, why don't we mandate
> >> also
> >> that perceived problems in the commit message shall not be an acceptable
> >> reason to -1 a change.
> >>
> >> Would this improve the situation?
> >>
> >
> > I actually *do* think a very poor commit message for a substantial patch
> > deserves a -1. The git commit message is our history for the patch, and it
> > is important in its own right. Now, nits like a single misspelled word or
> > the commit summary being 60 characters instead of 50 are not what I'm
> > talking about, of course.
> >
> > I'm speaking only about when a commit message blatantly disregards the
> > best practices of commit message writing [1] and doesn't offer anything of
> > value to the reviewer.
> >
> >
> +1.
> 
> Minor typos and grammatical errors I don't  care about (but will put in
> suggested fixes if the patch needs to be updated anyway). However, commit
> messages are very important for future debugging. One or two line vague
> commit messages can make life a lot harder for others in the future when
> writing a short description is not what I'd consider an excessive burden.
> And there should be no assumption that the person reading the commit
> message will have easy access to the bug database.
> 

We've had this discussion already, but just remember that not everybody
reading those commit messages will be a native English speaker. The more
incorrect the grammar and punctuation is, the more confusing it will be
to somebody who is already struggling with those concepts.