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git: Commit messages too long, allow configuring #1115
Description
The automatic commit messages emitted by the git integration get pretty long -- by default, they're some variation on f"Did op foo on {describe(doc)}", which with the default document-description-format of {doc[title]} - {doc[author]} becomes pretty long.
In contrast, git conventions are to have commit subjects be capped at 50 chars, and commit bodies be wrapped at 72 chars.
For that purpose, a better template would be eg
{op} {format(ref-format, doc)}
{% for field in commit-fields %}
{{field | wordwrap(72)}}
{% endfor %}
An alternative workaround is to pass --edit to the calls to git commit, which would allow editing the commit message before the call.
A further alternative is to absorb the git commit failures, and then just papis git commit to write the commit message yourself.
Or I could disable commit message standards for that repo, but I'd like to keep things neat.
BTW, note that the fact that the commit message is controlled by document-description-format is not documented, and I needed to hunt it down in the code.
Activity
alexfikl commentedon Dec 31, 2025
That sounds like a good idea, we should have some format specific for the git commit messages, since they're generally different to other "show user the operation being performed" log messages.
I'm not sure what standards you have, but employing something like conventional commits is probably a bit out of scope. Also, for the default python formatter, it will be difficult to ensure it stays to a fixed number of chars without an additional config variable or something.
hseg commentedon Dec 31, 2025