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[docs] CONTRIBUTING.md: specify bare infinitive instead of imperative#19064
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Technically, git commit subject lines are in the bare infinitive, not the imperative, because they're merely unconjugated, rather than being a command. (They are identical in form, though, so it's understandable that they were confused here.)Or, so I think, at least! For more information, you can seehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bare_infinitive ,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperative_mood , or this blog post I wrote about this subject a while ago:https://wyattscarpenter.github.io/blog/git_commit_messages_are_in_the_bare_infinitive.txt
To my surprise I was familiar with both terms and the proposed wording is correct, but... IMO this is overly pedantic. There are a lot of contributors here who only speak very basic English. The termimperative should be familiar to them as it's just basic grammar, whilebare infinitive may be less clear. I can easily imagine a commit/pr message "To prevent crash on a malformed input" because the author knows whatinfinitive means but never encounteredbare infinitive before and therefore just skipped it... |
This PR changes the git commit guidelines to say "Use the bare infinitive in the subject line" instead of "Use the imperative mood in the subject line"
Technically, git commit subject lines are in the bare infinitive, not the imperative, because they're merely unconjugated, rather than being a command. (They are identical in form, though, so it's understandable that they were confused here.)
Or, so I think, at least! For more information, you can seehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bare_infinitive ,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperative_mood , or this blog post I wrote about this subject a while ago:https://wyattscarpenter.github.io/blog/git_commit_messages_are_in_the_bare_infinitive.txt