On 24 June 2010 10:25, Kamil Dudka <kdudka_at_redhat.com> wrote:
> On Saturday 19 of June 2010 23:03:49 Daniel Stenberg wrote:
>>    A short guide to how to do fine commit messages in the curl project.
>>
>>    ---- start ----
>>    [area]: [short line describing the main effect]
>>
>>    [separate the above single line from the rest with an empty line]
>>
>>    [full description, no wider than 65 columns that describes as much as
>>    possible as to why this change is made, and possibly what things
>>    it fixes and everything else that is related]
>>     ---- stop ----
>
> I am just curious.  Where does the "65 columns" limit come from?  Sorry, if it
> has been already explained somewhere.

I think the standard for the first line is 50 columns. Not sure why
the full description needs to be 65. (At least Vim's idea of how long
the first line is supposed to be is 50 columns.)

Keeping the first line short makes sense if you're doing things like:

git log --pretty=oneline

although, "git log --oneline" is more likely, I suppose.

"git log --oneline --graph" can take up lots of space depending on how
many lines of development there are, but I'm not sure that's the
reason for the short line limit.

The current CHANGES file seems to be using a limit of 77 columns for
the text, prefixed with two spaces to make 79.

-- 
Michael Wood <esiotrot_at_gmail.com>
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