Oswald Buddenhagen [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

before making a commit.  But "this makes it impossible" does not
quite convey that to casual readers.

no, i meant what i wrote: it makes it _literally_ impossible. it follows
from the preceding sentence that _whatever_ is in the template will NOT
be the comment char.

OK, it (i.e. the order in which things happen) would be a good thing
to add to the explanation, to unconfuse readers who (incorrectly)
guess that auto comment character is determined and then template is
read, which is where my comment came from.

reading through the thread of the original submission, the feature is a
workaround for `commit -m` and `commit --amend` being inconsistent wrt.
message washing.

Perhaps somebody can be talked into fixing it ;-)

With a clear explanation, I am OK if somebody wants to advocate to
deprecate (and remove at Git 3.0 boundary) the "auto" support ;-)

Thanks.