Wow, they seem to have terrible commit message practice. The latest commit has a message of "...", and many others only have a bug number (which leads to an annoying usability issue on the github UI - I click the title to get to the commit - which now links to a GitHub issue).

[EDIT: Actually, 8 of the commits top of tree as of writing are "...". wow.]

On top of that, "Second effort to sanitize input string" at [1] appears related to this issue, and doesn't have a single test change, even on the second attempt!

[1]: https://github.com/ImageMagick/ImageMagick/commit/a347456a1e...

Don't they use SVN? http://www.imagemagick.org/script/subversion.php

Maybe github is just a mirror

(edits - nope, looks like they changed recently. perhaps it's a reflection of developers moving from svn to git)

Could this just be due to merges that don't squash commits?

Nope, a very quick check shows very little merge activity - the occasional pull request.

While I was at it, 49 commits using "..." as the message, and 8520 commits with absolutely no message at all.

I didn't realize you _could_ do a git commit without a message. Interesting, even if I can't think of why I'd ever want to.