[Cogito]

as davvid says, the git project is an excellent place to start. The git project inherited a lot of its practices from the linux kernel project, but they are different enough to make looking at both interesting.

The archive for the git list is at [1].

The other great thing to look for is a well designed standard, with examples, for how a commit message should look. Most everyone who uses a standard uses The Standard* [2], so I would suggest you do the same.

* Except that many projects don't require the sign-off

[1] http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

[2] http://tbaggery.com/2008/04/19/a-note-about-git-commit-messa... (I am pretty sure there is a very similar post from Linus on a mailing list somewhere, but I can't find it. This is the most commonly linked to that I could find.)

[EDIT] formatting...