30 lines
1.6 KiB
Markdown
30 lines
1.6 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: Which commit has the largest message?
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date: 2024-05-21
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permalink: daily/2024/05/21/which-commit-has-the-largest-message
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tags:
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- software-development
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- git
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cta: ~
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snippet: |
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Which commit in your Git repository has the largest commit message?
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---
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[I write and advocate for others to write][0] detailed Git commit messages within the subject body to provide context and information about why the commit was needed, what other options were considered, any consequences or knock-on effects there could be, or even code snippets or pseudo code.
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Recently, I was curious to know which commit in a repository has the longest commit message, what code has changed in that commit, and who wrote it.
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I was hoping for a command like `git shortlog --summary --all` (which shows all authors to a codebase and their number of commits), but couldn't find one, so [I wrote a script to do it][1].
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It's a bash script that loops over the commits in the repo, calculates the length of each message, sorts them and shows the commit with longest message.
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It was an interesting task and shows examples of using various UNIX commands and Linux coreutils, such as `find`, `cut`, `sort` and `wc` in combination with Git.
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The longest in this website's code base is [546 characters][2], which is fairly small compared to some of my messages in other projects.
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What's the longest commit message in the repository you're working in?
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[0]: {{site.url}}/daily/2024/05/17/why-i-dont-commit-with--m
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[1]: https://github.com/opdavies/git-commit-length-counter
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[2]: https://github.com/opdavies/oliverdavies.uk-drupal/commit/cbd1417b24a608df8b451a3ab5c9f888de41e758
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