Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] writes:

Karthik Nayak [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

So my intent was to instead was to allow the user to be in charge of
line-wrapping, but for no reason should that go beyond 120 columns.

I'm happy to change that to 80 columns, this does mean that supported
editors will start wrapping at 80 columns. Users will have to override
as necessary.

OK.  So stepping back a bit

 1. We advise people to avoid exceeding 80 columns

 2. A line can be easier to read without wrapping strictly at 80
    columns but left as a single line, slightly going above the
    limit..

 3. Even with the second observation above, a line that is way
    longer than 80 columns is not acceptably long.

Now, what is the line between the #2 and #3?  If we set these "hard
limit" to that number, as long as the tool does not pack multiple
shorter lines into one line using that number as a limit, we'd be at
a happy place, I would imagine?

Spot on. Doing some backhand analysis on our code base:

Total lines: 2136626
Max length: 904
Average length: 36.2
Median length: 32.0
90th percentile: 73.0
95th percentile: 79.0

Lines > 80 chars: 91650 (4.3%)
Lines > 100 chars: 54589 (2.6%)
Lines > 120 chars: 35529 (1.7%)

The `max_line_length` in '.editorconfig' is stated as:

  Forces hard line wrapping after the amount of characters specified.
  unset to turn off this feature (use the editor settings).

So it doesn't force packing shorter lines together, rather, only wraps
lines above the specified limit. This limit can be thought of the limit
beyond which a line is of unacceptable length. We can move this lower to
perhaps 100 or even 80, but that would force line wrapping at 80
characters. Which can be great, but there are situations like you
mentioned where we want to extend.

Thanks.