On Thu, Jul 17, 2014 at 10:19 AM, Frank Loeffler <knarf@cct.lsu.edu> wrote:

We could provide one. We cannot enforce people installing it.

> and on top of that set up the server to reject unformatted messages?

That is probably the better option. Although I would only see it as help
to "not forget about it", not an enforcement really (although
technically it is the same). We cannot disallow anything else than thorn
names before the ":" (we might have commit touching multiple thorns), so
we cannot technically prevent something like "somewhere: changed
something". But we don't need to technically enforce everything anyway.

This is a good point. While it seems like a good general guideline to have the thorn name as a prefix in any commit message, I'm not convinced it is a good idea to strictly enforce it. For example, what about commits that modify several thorns at once?

Carpet has a policy like this; in general commit messages are prefixed by the thorn name, but occasionally there will be a message which changes many thorns at once and doesn't adhere to this convention.