[dmart]

In the general case, I agree (with the first part of your comment.)

But Linus makes a valid case for wrapping at the time of text entry instead of display: they want to wrap to 72 characters except in certain, specific cases, like when you have lines of output that should be represented verbatim.

Now, if you're using something like Markdown, this is no problem: triple-backtick the code block and let the rest of the regular text wrap automatically. But since kernel commit messages are strictly plain text only, that's not an option.

[ben0x539]

The way that line wrapping works out between github and regular git is a shame, because apart from that, since markdown tries to emulate plaintext conventions, it's not hard at all to write commit messages that look good both as plaintext and as markdown. (In this case, use the "original" markdown code block syntax of indenting with a tab or four spaces instead of using backticks.)

[alexmingoia]

I disagree. There’s no valid use case. Users can word wrap lines at any width they want, easily.