This page is not authoritative. It is rather a collection of reasonable suggestions. Feel free to contribute to this page.

There's little technical merit to a standardized commit log format, except for much easier grepping. What we should value here is tradition.

Summary, ~50 characters, no trailing punctuation

This, that. A blank line between the summary line, and this first 
piece of free-form text. Hard wrap at 72 characters.

The other. Again, 72 characters. A blank line between this final 
piece of free-form text, and the colon-separated fields. 

First field:  value
Second field: value

• Don't forget a blank line between text and fields
• Start lines with a hyphen and a space where appropriate
• When referring to administrative bodies (e.g. core), write its name first, then alias(es) of the relevant representative(s)

portmgr (erwin, pav)
core (wilko)

• When referring to a person in a position (e.g. mentor), write his/her name or alias first, then position(s) in parentheses

phk (mentor)
John Doe <a@b.c> (maintainer)

• Give proper credit
• Obfuscate e-mail addresses at will
• If committer==submitter, the “Submitted by” field may be omitted
• Don't use pronouns in field values
• Use a spell-checker
• Limit characters to US-ASCII
• Use present tense
• Use RFC2822 name/e-mail format where appropriate. In particular, don't forget a space between name and opening angle bracket.
• Specify category of PR's, e.g. src/56789
• Use proper capitalization. In particular, start sentences with capital letters.
• Use FreeBSD aliases instead of names whenever possible
• Use lowercased make variable names when there is no ambiguity (e.g. “portrevision”)

PR:           12345
Approved by:  John Doe <john@doe.org> (maintainer)
Approved by:  phk (maintainer, implicit)
Approved by:  portmgr (erwin)
Approved by:  Dow Jones (maintainer timeout, 25 days)
Submitted by: Jane Doe <jane@doe.org>

Approved by:  maintainer
Approved by:  maintainer timeout
Approved by:  erwin (portmgr)

Reported by:  pointyhat via kris
Reported by:  pointyhat logs
Reported by:  portsmon
Submitted by: Ports Fury

• A maintainer sends a PR. You want to commit it with additional changes. The maintainer approves them:

- Update to 1.5 [1]
- Replace deprecated variable: INSTALLS_SHLIB [2]
- Use PORTDOCS to simplify pkg-plist [2]

PR:            ports/113760 [1]
Submitted by:  Antoine Brodin <brodin@leposte.net> (maintainer) [1]
Approved by:   Antoine Brodin <brodin@leposte.net> (maintainer) [2]

- Update to 1.2.3
- Take maintainership
- Pass maintainership to submitter
- Drop maintainership
Add port foo/bar: <pkg-descr follows>
- Connect foo/bar to the build
- Bump portrevision
- Fix plist
- Add rc script