[lmi] 72 chars for git log messages [Was: Improved input-sequence editor]

[Greg Chicares]

On 2016-05-28 18:16, Vadim Zeitlin wrote:
> On Sat, 28 May 2016 01:40:18 +0000 Greg Chicares <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> GC> The only alteration I made
> GC> was reformatting the commit messages to shorten lines thus:
> GC>   
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2290016/git-commit-messages-50-72-formatting
> 
>  Unfortunately 50 characters limit is really too short for me (I do realize
> that it's probably my problem rather than that of the guideline). And as
> with all limits it helps to understand its rationale: it's meant to ensure
> that even after adding a "[PATCH]" prefix and a couple of "Re:"s to it, the
> subject still fits into 80 characters, so it's mostly important for email-
> based workflows. I don't think it's that important for lmi and I think we
> could relax it a bit... I use 65 personally and it seems to work well.

Okay. This useful command
  git log --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit
uses the first eight columns for the sha1sum, e.g.:

12345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890
a8e49cc Remove non-existent main_wx.hpp from the list of headers in Makefile.am.
72-->   123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012

so I'm satisfied if we agree never to write any line longer than seventy-two
characters anywhere. (For 'git log', we lose four characters on the left to
indentation, so seventy-six wouldn't cause wrapping in the body, but it's
probably better just to declare one universal limit, seventy-two.)

>  BTW, it really was _not_ an exception and git commit messages from
> Savannah don't have any subject for non-summary messages. This probably
> bothers me more than it should, do you think it's worth asking Savannah
> admins about this?

Agreed:
  https://savannah.gnu.org/support/?109047#comment3