  Code commit messages can contain useful information on why a developer has
made a change. However, the presence and structure of rationale in real-world
code commit messages is not well studied. Here, we detail the creation of a
labelled dataset to analyze the code commit messages of the Linux Kernel
Out-Of-Memory Killer component. We study aspects of rationale information, such
as presence, temporal evolution, and structure. We find that 98.9% of commits
in our dataset contain sentences with rationale information, and that
experienced developers report rationale in about 60% of the sentences in their
commits. We report on the challenges we faced and provide examples for our
labelling.
