Re: Question about commit message wrapping

On Sun, Dec 11, 2011 at 11:00 PM, Andrew Ardill [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Additional and the more serious problem with wrapping on output is
related to backward compatibility.  If you have commit message that is
wrapped e.g. to 80 characters, and you wrap on output to 72 characters,
you would get ugly and nigh unreadable ragged output

For what it's worth, I do a lot of reading emails on my phone, which
force wraps line-length to the width of the display (not a set number
of characters).
This is always less than 80.

Good point.

Emails on this list are almost exclusively sent pre-wrapped to 80
character line lengths.
The result is exactly the kind of ragged output you used in your
example. Changing this behaviour may break backwards compatibility,
but it is already broken for 'future' compatibility.

I am starting to think that we need to somehow keep the current
behavior, but override at smaller widths. Maybe even use format=flowed
in format-patch. On the other hand, the fundamental use with git is to
communicate code, and I'm not sure how that [cw]ould be handled.