Suggestion: concise summary as 1st line of commit message

[Colin D Bennett]

I would like to suggest that the first line of all commit messages
consist of a brief summary (80 or fewer characters) of the commit.

This would make it a thousand times easier to see what changes are
actually taking place from the VCS log.  Currently you see things like:

2220: Colin Watson 2010-02-25 2010-02-25  Jordan Uggla  <jordan.ugg...
2219: Vladimir 'phcoder... 2010-02-24 2010-02-24  Vladimir Serbinen...
2218: Vladimir 'phcoder... 2010-02-24 2010-02-24  Vladimir Serbinen...
2217: Vladimir 'phcoder... 2010-02-24 Remove trailing spaces in ker...
2216: Colin Watson 2010-02-24 2010-02-24  Joey Korkames  <joey+list...
2215: Vladimir 'phcoder... 2010-02-22 2010-02-20  Vladimir Serbinen...
2214: carles 2010-02-20 2010-02-20  Carles Pina i Estany  <address@hidden
2213: Manoel Rebelo Abr... 2010-02-20 2010-02-20  Manoel Rebelo Abr...

Now there is exactly one revision in this log excerpt that you can
actually guess something about its content/purpose, revision 2217.
(This is probably just because no changelog entry was required, and so a
single line commit message was sufficient.)

It's important to have sufficient detail in the commit messages,
but I think that a concise summary as the first line, instead of
repeating the committer/author name (which is already part of the
commit metadata and is shown separately by all VCS tools) would be
tremendously helpful.

Are there any objections?

Regards,
Colin

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