git log messages - FYI

[Matthias Hopf]

Appearantly, several git tools assume a special formated log message.
We don't follow these conventions yet, and at least git-rebase behaves
strangely if they are not followed.

... from the git mailing list:

It is however quite a different story when it comes to the
higher level tools that come with git.  The log summarize
facilities to let humans interact with the commits expect that a
commit log message consists of a one-line "summary", a blank
line, and then the body of the message.  These "log listers" are:

 . git log --pretty=oneline
 . gitk
 . gitweb
 . gitview
 . git shortlog

The "one-line summary plus body of the message" has a strong
correlation with how we communicate patches via e-mail.  You do
not start a sentence on the "Subject: " header and continue on
to the body of the message, starting the body halfway of the
sentence.  Instead, you try to make sure you write something
sensible by itself on the "Subject: " header to help the
recipient when later scanning for it among bunch of messages,
and you write a full paragraph that you can understand without
reading the subject line first.  The following commands that
deal with e-mailed patches expect you to follow that convention:

 . git am
 . git applymbox
 . git format-patch


Matthias

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