Linus Torvalds writes pretty awesome commit messages

I like commit messages that capture the programmers thoughts well. A short, concise summary is important. The rest of the stuff is often things I want to know when I'm looking at a commit. Something is wrong with it, and I want to understand what the goal was as clearly as possible.

Doing more than one thing at once, no matter how trivial, often seems to bite, though.

Git considers the first line of the message the "shortlog", and not surprisingly, Linus has a very accurate, succinct shortlog. The git tools make it very easy to get reports using just the shortlog. So you can have what you want, those who want long logs have that. Best of both worlds.