Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 09/10] pretty: implement 'summary' format

From: SZEDER Gábor <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 14 Nov 2019 02:10:48 +0100

On Fri, Nov 08, 2019 at 12:08:34PM -0800, Denton Liu wrote:
> The standard format for referencing other commits within some projects
> (such as git.git) is the summary format. This is described in
> Documentation/SubmittingPatches as
> 
> 	If you want to reference a previous commit in the history of a stable
> 	branch, use the format "abbreviated hash (subject, date)",
> 	with the subject enclosed in a pair of double-quotes, like this:
> 
> 	....
> 		Commit f86a374 ("pack-bitmap.c: fix a memleak", 2015-03-30)
> 		noticed that ...
> 	....
> 
> Since this format is so commonly used, standardize it as a pretty
> format.

SubmittingPatches is simply wrong: our de-facto standard format for
referencing other commits does not enclose the subject in a pair of
double-quotes:

  $ git log v2.24.0 |grep -E '[0-9a-f]{7} \("' |wc -l
  785
  $ git log v2.24.0 |grep -E '[0-9a-f]{7} \([^"]' |wc -l
  2276

Those double-quotes don't add any value to the references, but they
result in weird looking references for 1083 of our commits whose
subject lines happen to end with double-quotes, e.g.:

  f23a465132 ("hashmap_get{,_from_hash} return "struct hashmap_entry *"", 2019-10-06)

and without those unnecessary pair of double-quotes we would have
~3000 more commits whose summary would fit on a single line.