Linus Torvalds Asks Kernel Devs To Write Better Git Merge Commit Messages

Phoronix's Michael Larabel reports: Yesterday when announcing the Linux 6.12-rc2 kernel, Linus Torvalds asked that the kernel maintainers do a better job moving forward with their commit messages. In particular, Torvalds is hoping that kernel maintainers will do a better job using an active, imperative voice when describing the changes within their pull requests.

The Linux creator explained in the 6.12-rc2 announcement: 'Anyway, on a completely different note: I try to make my merge commit messages be somewhat 'cohesive', and so I often edit the pull request language to match a more standard layout and language. It's not a big deal, and often it's literally just about whitespace so that we don't have fifteen different indentation models and bullet syntaxes. I generally do it as I read through the text anyway, so it's not like it makes extra work for me. But what *does* make extra work is when some maintainers use passive voice, and then I try to actively rewrite the explanation (or, admittedly, sometimes I just decide I don't care quite enough about trying to make the messages sound the same). So I would ask maintainers to please use active voice, and preferably just imperative. '

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