Linus Torvalds's commit message style guide. Taken from the README for one of this projects[0]. For examples of commit messages in this style, see `git log` for the linux kernel[1] project. =============================================================================== Also, please write good git commit messages. A good commit message looks like this: Header line: explaining the commit in one line Body of commit message is a few lines of text, explaining things in more detail, possibly giving some background about the issue being fixed, etc etc. The body of the commit message can be several paragraphs, and please do proper word-wrap and keep columns shorter than about 74 characters or so. That way "git log" will show things nicely even when it's indented. Reported-by: whoever-reported-it Signed-off-by: Your Name where that header line really should be meaningful, and really should be just one line. That header line is what is shown by tools like gitk and shortlog, and should summarize the change in one readable line of text, independently of the longer explanation. =============================================================================== 0: https://github.com/torvalds/subsurface 1: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commits/master