Subject: Re: [PATCH] Teach git-commit about commit message templates.

From: Steven Grimm <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2007 18:23:48 +0800

Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> Up until here, I was with you.  But this feels very wrong.
>
> Why not compare COMMIT_MSG to the templatefile, if there is one?  I.e.
>
> test ! -z "$templatefile" && cmp "$GIT_DIR"/COMMIT_MSG "$templatefile" &&
> 	die "Unchanged message; will not commit"
>   

The template can itself have comments -- instructions or explanations of 
fields to fill in, for example -- and since comments have been stripped 
from COMMIT_MSG at this point, a comparison against such a template 
would always fail. And, consistent with the current behavior, simply 
adding a Signed-off-by: line shouldn't count as supplying a commit message.

I could do this test before stripping comments from COMMIT_MSG, but then 
I'd still fail the comparison if the user just deleted some comment 
lines manually, which also seems wrong to me -- the comments should be 
totally ignored when doing this comparison, IMO. Plus that wouldn't 
ignore Signed-off-by: lines.

If I'm coming at the design the wrong way, I'm of course happy to adjust 
it, but insensitivity to both comments and Signed-off-by: lines seemed 
like the right behavior from the user's POV to me, and I didn't see a 
cleaner way to do it.

Thanks for looking at the patch!

-Steve