Re: Moving GLib and GTK+ to git

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

Hi,

On Tue, 2009-03-31 at 21:29 +0200, Martin Nordholts wrote:
> Matthias Clasen wrote:
> >  - First line (the brief description) must only be one sentence and
> >    must not start with a capital letter. Don't use a trailing period
> >    either. Don't exceed 76 characters.

(Btw, should probably say 72 characters so 'git log | git shortlog'
output is bounded to 80 characters so it's bearable to look at in a
normal terminal; see below for details.)

> 
> Hi,
> 
> Is there any particular reason for not starting with a capital letter,
> e.g. are there any tools that depend on it? In general I think a
> sentence look nicer if it starts with a capital letter, including those
> that does not end with a period. From a quick look at the most recent
> commit messages for the Linux kernel and git itself, it does not seem as
> if they have a rule such as the one above, which makes me even more
> curious why we should have it.

I think it's just about consistency (having some commits start with a
non-capital and some start with a capital looks weird; ditto for
trailing periods) not so much about about a preference on whether it
should be non-capital/capital. 

Personally I prefer non-capital and no periods; it makes the output of
'git log |git shortlog' nicer to look at (see [1] for an example) but
maybe that's just me. I think capital letters would work nice here too;
trailing periods would probably look weird though.

     David


[1] :

David Zeuthen (198):
      [...]
      add some notes about terminology
      use the term "Name" instead of "Label" when creating a partition
      rework terminology for filesystem labels / partition labels
      fix compiler warnings introduced by the last set of patches
      add some experimental code for grid-based layout
      fix some criticals where we tried to access non-existant widgets
      rework partition table handling

Matthias Clasen (13):
      HIG fixes
      trivial coding style fix
      avoid dialog resizing
      don't allow empty passphrases
      improved spacing for sections
      [...]