Please wrap change descriptions at 80 columns or so

[Nico Weber]

Hi,

webkit-patch used to auto-wrap CL descriptions. That doesn't happen with `git cl upload` or if you edit the CL description on rietveld.

`git log` doesn't rewrap commit messages. Please keep `git log` usable by not making your CL description lines too long. Thanks :-)

Nico

[Dana Jansens]

See also the chromium-dev thread "Git-friendly CL Descriptions" for more details on perfect CL messages: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!searchin/chromium-dev/Git-friendly$20CL$20Descriptions/chromium-dev/sRRWJwvy2C8/qIWO7trwI6QJ

[Marc-Antoine Ruel]

As a vim user, I usually do something that looks like:

i

<edit the text>

<ESC>

ggVGgqZZ

This is assuming you have in your ~/.vimrc:

set tw=80

Having git-cl automatically word wrap could be potentially annoying. :/ I'm not sure yet what's the best thing to do here. I'll appreciate either comments or patches.

M-A

2013/4/8 Nico Weber <tha...@chromium.org>

[Torne (Richard Coles)]

Yeah, ideally you want 72 columns not 80, as git log indents the commit message for display by default, which means 80 is too wide :)

--
Torne (Richard Coles)
to...@google.com

[Marc-Antoine Ruel]

Maybe I should change git_cl.py to fire up vim -c "set tw=72" <commit desc file> by default?

:P

But 72 cols is really a linux kernel historical rule. I don't think it's valuable to even try to enforce something this narrow here.

M-A

2013/4/8 Torne (Richard Coles) <to...@google.com>

[Torne (Richard Coles)]

Sure, but the default git log output still indents by four spaces, so if we care about wrapping *anywhere*, we should wrap at no more than 76 :)

[Dana Jansens]

On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 9:41 AM, Torne (Richard Coles) <to...@google.com> wrote:

Sure, but the default git log output still indents by four spaces, so if we care about wrapping *anywhere*, we should wrap at no more than 76 :)

72 keeps reverts from going over 80 col, since they are indented further.

[Daniel Bratell]

Den 2013-04-08 18:47:38 skrev Dana Jansens <dan...@chromium.org>:

> On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 9:41 AM, Torne (Richard Coles)
> <to...@google.com>wrote:
>
>> Sure, but the default git log output still indents by four spaces, so if
>> we care about wrapping *anywhere*, we should wrap at no more than 76 :)
>>
>
> 72 keeps reverts from going over 80 col, since they are indented further.

If Blink is going to use git, it seems best to use the git conventions for
commit messages. Those are:

----------
Summary line with a max length of about 50 characters

Then an empty line followed by a longer description with a max length
of about 72 character. The 50 character limit is because that line is
often combined with dates, author names and other supplementary data
in logs or other tools. The 72 character length is, as others have said,
to allow a limited indentation without getting too long.

You can also read here or at several other similar places:
http://tbaggery.com/2008/04/19/a-note-about-git-commit-messages.html
----------

/Daniel

[Nico Weber]

On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 9:59 AM, Daniel Bratell <bra...@opera.com> wrote:

Den 2013-04-08 18:47:38 skrev Dana Jansens <dan...@chromium.org>:

On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 9:41 AM, Torne (Richard Coles) <to...@google.com>wrote:

Sure, but the default git log output still indents by four spaces, so if
we care about wrapping *anywhere*, we should wrap at no more than 76 :)

72 keeps reverts from going over 80 col, since they are indented further.

If Blink is going to use git, it seems best to use the git conventions for commit messages.

The last few times we had threads on this, fights about column counts ensued which is why I didn't mention an exact count :-) If people are aware that they need to manually wrap their CL descriptions and not make the lines "too long", that's probably good enough.

Nico

[Peter Kasting]

On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 10:09 AM, Nico Weber <tha...@chromium.org> wrote:

The last few times we had threads on this, fights about column counts ensued which is why I didn't mention an exact count :-) If people are aware that they need to manually wrap their CL descriptions and not make the lines "too long", that's probably good enough.

I'm more sympathetic to these concerns than I used to be, but I still think telling people to do this manually is to some degree going to be frustrating.  It would be nice if our tooling either enforced or at least informed about these restrictions.

PK 

[Brett Wilson]

I'm opposed to telling people to wrap CL descriptions to 80 cols. And
even if we did, I, along with many others, aren't going to remember so
it seems pointless trying.

Brett

[Eric Seidel]

It seems we could just fix the tool instead of trying to fix the people? :)

Rietveld is a smart little piece of python, I'm sure it could learn to wrap CL descriptions if necessary. (Or Git when displaying them?)

[Dana Jansens]

On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 8:11 PM, Eric Seidel <ese...@chromium.org> wrote:

It seems we could just fix the tool instead of trying to fix the people? :)

Rietveld is a smart little piece of python, I'm sure it could learn to wrap CL descriptions if necessary. (Or Git when displaying them?)

Git descriptions are intentionally allowed to go beyond 80 cols in case you need to include text that would become less clear if it was wrapped.

But providing strong hints is really helpful. I really like the "This is 72 columns" comment in the default file opened when editing your upload message. It's too bad rietveld doesn't have some similar UI (and use a fixed-width font).

[Marc-Antoine Ruel]

Only if someone on the team knew js/css enough to draw a yellow line at 72 cols and a read line at 80 cols in the description textbox on Rietveld...

[I don't, shame on me]

M-A

2013/8/23 Dana Jansens <dan...@chromium.org>

[Julie Parent]

I have a change to Rietveld to add the commit message as a special file you review during normal code review process.  It will display at whatever column width you have set (usually 80 chars), so it will be obvious when it is over 80 chars, and your reviewer can even comment on it!  I hope to finish this change this week.

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[PhistucK]

This is great!

☆PhistucK

[Rouslan Solomakhin]

You can also run "git cl description" to open the CL description in your favorite editor. If it's vim, then "gq" command in normal mode does a pretty good job of wrapping text.