Gerrit/Commit message guidelines

The commit message play an important role in revision control systems. They are the first thing other people will see of your commit.

Conventions

1. The first line of the commit message is known as the subject and describes the change briefly (optionally prefix it with the changed component). It should be no more than 50 characters (must be less than 62).
2. Keep the second line empty. This separates the subject from the body. Without this the following lines will be interpreted as part of the subject.
3. Use the body of the commit message to describe your change in detail. Explain what the commit changes, your design choice, possible culprits to look at, and any research you might have done. Bytes are cheap, so just write! Wrap the body of the message between 70 and 100 characters.

Subject

The first line of the commit message (the "subject") is especially important. It helps reviewers to see at a glance what the commit is about.

Phrase your subject in imperative mood. For example "make foo do bar" instead of "[This patch] makes foo do bar" or "[I am] changing foo to do bar".

If you are unable to summarise your change in a short line, perhaps it is too early to push it to Gerrit, or maybe it contains too many different things that should be broken up into different commits.

Many interfaces use the subject to identify a commit, such as:

• E-mail notifications from Gerrit
• IRC notifications from gerrit-wm
• Search results in Gerrit
• Commit subject in Gitweb
• Commit history at GitHub
• Commit subject at GitHub
• git shortlog, git log --oneline etc.
• Release notes of Wikimedia deployment branches of MediaWiki
• and much more

In all these cases the subject is rendered as plain text. Avoid using bugzilla or git references in the subject as they have no meaning in plain text. Instead mention them in the body text and/or as key-value pairs in the footer. When someone views the change in Gerrit this data is parsed (bug references, git hashes, urls all become linkified).

As being a title (not a sentence in a paragraph) it should not end in a full stop. Though one can argue about the semantics of it being a sentence or a title, consistency is important and we don't in a full stop.

Body

Try to make your commit message understandable without external resources. Instead of just giving a URL to a mailing list archive, summarize the relevant points of the discussion.

Whenever you refer to another commit, use either the SHA-1 of the merged commit, or the Gerrit Change-Id of the changeset in Gerrit (avoid using Gerrit or Gitweb urls). If the commit in question has not been merged yet, use the Gerrit Change-Id instead of the SHA1 because the SHA1 changes every patch set (the SH1 reference would potentially be a dead end).

Example

jquery.badge: Add ability to display the number zero

Cupcake ipsum dolor sit. Amet tart cheesecake tiramisu chocolate cake
topping. Icing ice cream sweet roll. Biscuit dragée toffee wypas.

I love tootsie roll donut oat cake soufflé. Chupa chups danish carrot
cake. I love chocolate candy cookie sesame snaps sesame snaps lollipop
carrot cake.

Sweet roll dragée bear claw cheesecake dragée. Icing apple pie
macaroon carrot cake I love I love ice cream sweet roll. Brownie
powder bonbon marshmallow dessert liquorice I love tiramisu.
Follows-up Id5e7cbb1.

Bug: 12345
Change-Id: I88c5f819c42d9fe1468be6b2cf74413d7d6d6907

See also

• A Note About Git Commit Messages - Tim Pope
• Using Git - Data Mapper
• Contribution guidelines - nodejs
• Submitting patches - git-core