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Comment by highwind | Hacker News Reader

I understand the justification for the DOs. But what's the purpose of that single DON'T?

I saw that too and did a double take. A single-byte delta in a human readable string that in most cases corresponds to correct English grammar (good commit summaries are almost always phrased as a command: "Check blobdinger arguments in frozzle()." "Don't emit the grip command when we're in mouse mode.") is... a high-priority DON'T rule for commit messages in general?

This is aesthetic nonsense masquerading as objective advice, and it makes me want to doubt the rest of the items too (though honestly most of them seem fine). I never understand why people are so drawn to this kind of silliness. It's like arguing if there should be a space between "if" and "(" (and yes, I've seen people do that too).

Given that the summary should be a single phrase, I find a period redundant and when doing git log --pretty=oneline, it looks nicer without the period.

Doesn't seem like an amazing rationale; personally, I like periods -- they let me know the writer finished their thought.

If it's the end of the message, one can assume the thought was completed there.

The first line is usually part of an email title.

And periods at the end of single-sentence email subjects are ... bad?

Commits don't have to end the email subject, often I receive emails like this from some automated system:

  sys: commit message (issue XXX)

And in English titles never end with a period anyway.

I'm still not following, why would a period ("sys: commit message. (issue XXX)" be a problem there? If anything, with your example I'd argue the period makes it more readable as it makes it clearer that "(issue XXX)" isn't part of the message.

To reduce line noise, you also want to avoid people worrying about whether or not such-and-such qualifies as a "complete sentence" in English.

N.B.: Requiring complete sentences in one-line summaries isn't generally a good rule, here or elsewhere, unless you like space-wasting filler. In describing a $memberType of $objectType, "This $memberType $actionVerbs the $objectType's $relation $relatedThing." is unnecessarily verbose. And I say this as someone who generally writes only complete sentences in SMS messages.

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