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Markdown renderers seem perfectly capable of this. git wouldn't even need to disambiguate asterisk for lists vs. asterisk for emphasis.

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So every piece of software now needs a markdown renderer?

If Linus wants a consistent commit message format, he should enforce it at the software level, rather than hoping people read a comment he left in a repository about logging his swimming information.

This does not mean that the format needs to be Markdown (which includes embedded HTML, so obviously not Markdown), or that all software needs a Markdown renderer. I'm not sure why you'd conclude that.

Enforcing is an administrative task committed by specific people in specific projects (there is a thing called 'best practice', but it never is a hard rule). Tools authors should not enforce anything, it's not their job, responsibility and competence, even if a particular project like Linux has the same Linus for both project management / rcs tool writing.

we don't even need markdown. Groff and less are already there and already handle formatting and reflowing just fine.

Groff is a text processing/formatting system so same issue, and less doesn't handle jack shit.

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