Subject: Re: Feeling confused a little bit

From: Rafael Ascensão <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 2 Mar 2019 04:24:14 +0000

On Fri, Mar 01, 2019 at 06:43:26PM +0530, Rohit Ashiwal wrote:
> >
> > Simple things do not need that many letters to tell ;-)  The
> > suggestion of 72 is about the maximum. 
> >
> 
> Totally agree on this!
>

I was bikeshedding the patch and mentioned that the commit message body
is usually wrapped at 72 because I noticed you were wrapping the body at
50.

So to make things clear, when you're writing the subject, i.e. the first
line, you should aim towards 50 and do not exceed 72.

The body, i.e. 3rd line until EOF is usually wrapped at 72.

There are exceptions, these are guidelines. Sometimes commits will break
the first rule. (Merges are the most common example I can think of, but
you won't be doing any as a contributor).
Pre-formatted content, like the output of a program, will break the
second. Look at 3b41fb0cb217f4b4491f2e67ce4183e5d2a5d873 for an example.

But my nitpick wasn't necessarily because I didn't agree about the way
you line wrapped the patch. It was about figuring out if you had a
misconfigured editor (that could also be the cause of tabs and spaces
mix), which you later mentioned was probably the case.

Cheers,
Rafael Ascensão