Re: Suggestion: concise summary as 1st line of commit message

[Colin Watson]

On Tue, Mar 02, 2010 at 12:38:23PM -0800, Colin D Bennett wrote:
> I would like to suggest that the first line of all commit messages
> consist of a brief summary (80 or fewer characters) of the commit.

I agree that this would be a good idea.  I don't like our current commit
message format either.

(In many cases, it would be sufficient to drop the first two lines - the
author name and the blank line - as there's often a short summary after
that anyway, and even if you lose a bit due to it running over multiple
lines it's still more useful than what we have now.)

> It's important to have sufficient detail in the commit messages,
> but I think that a concise summary as the first line, instead of
> repeating the committer/author name (which is already part of the
> commit metadata and is shown separately by all VCS tools) would be
> tremendously helpful.

Furthermore, we should consistently use 'bzr commit --author' when
committing changes by other people (I've been guilty of forgetting this
myself).  With that, there's absolutely no need to list the author
separately.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       address@hidden