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Re:Linus Torvalds: 'I Do No Coding Any More' by xorcist on Sunday July 05, 2020 @04:57PM (#23741909)
"Supposed" to?

Git was made with the intention that commit messages look like whole emails, describing not only why the change was made but also the thought process behind it, why this particular solution was chosen instead of some other etc.

What you describe is a decent header, although most people would probably prefer "Add ability to" (not "Added ability to", this is a custom that goes way back before git).

Inline documentation, or comments, is something else entirely. That is a moving target that can describe intended usage, remote APIs, and hard to understand passages. Commit messages describes a particular changeset, at a fixed point in time.

Google it, and see that most people's ideas of a good commit message goes way beyond the header ("shortlog") line.

Re:Linus Torvalds: 'I Do No Coding Any More' by alphachloride on Monday July 06, 2020 @12:28AM (#23744691)
Could be selection bias. People who comment about good commit messages are most likely people who pay attention to commit messages. That does not necessarily mean they make up a majority of committers.
Re:Linus Torvalds: 'I Do No Coding Any More' by alexchantavy on Monday July 06, 2020 @12:20AM (#23744657)
GitHub discourages making commit messages longer than a certain number of characters; it’s interesting for me to see other opinions on that.
Re:Linus Torvalds: 'I Do No Coding Any More' by andersonvom on Monday July 06, 2020 @12:27AM (#23744690)
You're talking about the title of the commit message. Yes, the title is supposed to be under 50 characters. Now add a blank line after it and you can write all you want (line wrap at 72 chars).

If you use markdown Syntax in your commit body, github and other tools will gladly render it correctly. You can grep for commit messages with "git log --grep <pattern>" and it will also search commit bodies as well. It's beautiful!

Re:Linus Torvalds: 'I Do No Coding Any More' by smichel17 on Wednesday July 08, 2020 @06:26AM (#23768563)
Adding on to sibling comment, on GitHub the additional lines they're talking about go in the box before the commit title.