Free Software Linux

"I'll just take this opportunity to ask people that when they send bug-fixes, please try to make the subject line and message make sense for a *reader*, not for yourself (or even to me, although if it's readable to some generic person, it's hopefully readable to me too!)," Linus Torvalds explained in response to a recent bugfix. He went on to provide some general rules:

"1)if it's not fairly generic, specify the area (architecture, subsystem, driver) that the fix is for in the subject line. [...] 2) don't use commit names in the subject line - and while it's great to use them in the body of the explanation, even there you don't want to assume that people read it from within git. [...] 3) write the commit message for an outsider, and use whitespace. The third-most common fixup I end up doing (after the above two) is to split things up into shorter paragraphs, after somebody wrote a good changelog entry, but made it one large unreadable blob of text."

Linus added, "I end up editing just about half of all the commit messages of stuff I get in email (except for Andrew's stuff, since Andrew largely does the same kinds of cleanups anyway, so I only need to edit up a small percentage of the patches he forwards). I'd like it to be *much* less than that, so I thought I should speak up since I had an example of this."

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