Git commit message guidelines

The first line of the commit message should be a short description (50 characters is the soft limit), and should skip the full stop.

The body should provide a meaningful commit message, which:

• uses the imperative, present tense: “change” not “changed” or “changes”.

• includes motivation for the change, and contrasts its implementation with previous behaviour.

• Wrap lines at 72 chars or so

See

• http://tbaggery.com/2008/04/19/a-note-about-git-commit-messages.html

• http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git;a=blob;f=Documentation/SubmittingPatches;h=ece3c77482b3ff006b973f1ed90b708e26556862;hb=HEAD

• http://365git.tumblr.com/post/3308646748/writing-git-commit-messages

for some justifications on this strategy

An example commit message:

BUG: #nnnnn - Capitalized, short (50 chars) summary

More detailed explanatory text, if necessary. Wrap it to about 72 characters or so. In some contexts, the first line is treated as the subject of an email and the rest of the text as the body. The blank line separating the summary from the body is critical (unless you omit the body entirely); tools like rebase can get confused if you run the two together.

Write your commit message in the present tense: "Fix bug" and not "Fixed bug." This convention matches up with commit messages generated by commands like git merge and git revert.

Further paragraphs come after blank lines.

• Bullet points are okay, too

• Typically a hyphen or asterisk is used for the bullet, preceded by a single space, with blank lines in between, but conventions vary here

• Use a hanging indent