Subject: Re: Make commit messages optional

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 14 Apr 2022 10:25:22 -0700

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <[email-masked]> writes:

> On Thu, Apr 14 2022, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
>
>> I would have thought it was painfully obvious that changing the
>> *default* is a ***terrible*** idea?
>>
>> Is anyone other than the OP seriously promoting changing the default?
>
> Urm, yeah? I am, in the E-Mail upthread that replied to. The OP here is
> [email-masked].

Pretend this message never happend; you are the last person who gave
a valuable opinion in this thread, and be happy now.

> ...
> I just suspect that we can do so much more effectively and encourage
> more effectivey workflows by doing so at the point of propagation, not
> commit.

We are talking about "git commit" Porcelain.  Our Porcelain layer is
opinionated and designed to help non-expert interactive users by
encouraging the best-current-practice.  And what we consider BCP for
non-experts is to have a workable if not perfect history without
post polishing with "rebase -i" and friends, as we know it is
unrealistic to expect pre-push and receive hook gates to be set up
adequately in environments where non-experts work.

Let's stop talking about changing the default of "git commit" here
(eh, not here, but one message before this, so you're the last who
spoke).  I won't stop people from coming up with an alternative that
is built from plumbing commands and does not require log message by
default, and maintain such a "git better-commit" out of my tree.

Thanks.