Re: [PATCH] SubmittingPatches: Cite the 50 char subject limit

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> writes:

> Change the SubmittingPatches recommendations to mention the 50
> character soft limit on patch subject lines. 50 characters is the soft
> limit mentioned in git-commit(1) and gittutorial(7), it's also the
> point at which Gitweb, GitHub and various other Git front ends start
> abbreviating the commit message.

Hmph, we probably would want to do s/50 character/&s/ in the two manual
pages.  I do not think if anybody is ready to stand behind the specific
number "50", and we can bikeshed about it separately.

The spirit of having a soft limit is twofold:

 - It should fit on "git log --oneline" comfortably;

 - If your change is too complex to be summarized in such a short
   sentence, you probably are doing too many things in one commit.

The first does not justify "50" any better than other arbitrary limit, but
with things like --graph and --source, anything longer makes the resulting
output very close to the edge of an 80-column terminal.

The second does not justify "50" either, as your language may be verbose
or terse (e.g. Japanese can cram far more information in a 140-char tweet
than somebody writing in English), but it is a more important one between
the two rationales above.