Hm... Do you mean to allow the merger to specify the value of the commit? E. g. by default it could be 1%, but merger can make it smaller if commit is not very valuable. Sounds like a good idea, thanks!

Yep, that's what I was imagining. And perhaps projects would publish any guidelines they end up going by for what commits could be worth.

Interesting idea. Here's a twist: what if the committer could set the value of their commit instead? Social pressure would dictate that most people would not overreach. Then those who make small but useful commits could recognize in advance their minor nature. This is essentially a kind of honour system.

That's actually a good idea; you'd probably get fairly reasonable results that way. The downside: using those tags at all makes it unambiguously clear that you care about the tip4commit tips.

One plausible possibility that might help: in the block that normally contains Signed-off-by and Reviewed-by, add a tag for marking a commit as "minor" or "trivial", in the sense used by the Linux kernel's trivial@ patches or the GNU project's threshold for changes accepted without copyright assignment.

And as a quick hack, scale the tip by log(diffstat) with a sensible upper bound.

The problem with that is it forces you to reject good commits by people who want more than you think the commit is worth.