Skip to content

[docs] CONTRIBUTING.md: specify bare infinitive instead of imperative #19064

New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Open
wants to merge 1 commit into
base: master
Choose a base branch
from

Conversation

wyattscarpenter
Copy link
Contributor

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 see https://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

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 see https://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
@sterliakov
Copy link
Collaborator

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 term imperative should be familiar to them as it's just basic grammar, while bare infinitive may be less clear. I can easily imagine a commit/pr message "To prevent crash on a malformed input" because the author knows what infinitive means but never encountered bare infinitive before and therefore just skipped it...

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Development

Successfully merging this pull request may close these issues.

2 participants