Is there a length limit on checkin comments?

[joshyeager]

My team did a large merge a few months ago, and when we went back to look at the changeset, the merge comments were truncated. We did not receive any warnings before we committed the merge, and this truncation caused a lot of confusion when one of my devs tried to go back and find the source of one of the changes in that merge.

Is there a length limit on checkin comments? If so, is there any way to increase it, so that our merges don't lose their comments?

[lbauer]

Yes there is a length limit, but the checkin comments dialog doesn't warn you when you've reached the database limit. There's no way to increase the length at this time.

Merges can have large checkin comments, as the checkin comment is made up of the concatenation of all of the changeset comments used for the branch merge.

We have bug 14612 logged to increase the length; I'll add your "vote."

[joshyeager]

Thanks, Linda.

[GregM]

Can the length limit be enforced by the dialog?

[joshyeager]

It is enforced by the dialog - once you hit the limit, it prevents you from typing any more text.

[GregM]

Linda said that it didn't, so I was just going by that. If it already does, great.

[joshyeager]

I think she meant that it doesn't display any warning messages when you hit the limit. It just silently stops accepting new text. This can be a little confusing, but it works.

[lbauer]

I think she meant that it doesn't display any warning messages when you hit the limit. It just silently stops accepting new text. This can be a little confusing, but it works.

Yes that's what I meant.

There are two problems with this behavior

1) there should be a warning
2) If there's no warning, you don't know that the comments in a Merge Branches checkin have been truncated, since you're not typing them in yourself. I'll update the bug to address both of these.