From: Dominik Riebeling <dominik.riebeling_at_gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2010 18:47:17 +0200

On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 5:28 PM, Amaury Pouly <amaury.pouly_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> You seem to always think about the users but I think you are missing the
> point. Developers too want clear commit messages (or at the very least,
> several people on this ML have shown interest in good commit messages).

I completely agree with that. The few seconds (or probably minutes)
spent for writing a more verbose commit message can save a *lot* of
time later when reading the logs, bisecting things, or just trying to
understand a commit. I've even experienced that with my own commits
(and was annoyed by those commits I was lazy about because they
weren't published)! From my point of view it's a similar issue as with
top-posting or not: top-posting saves the sender a couple of seconds
but requires the readers to spend more time. Same goes for non-verbose
commit messages: it saves the committer a bit of time but everyone who
looks at the commit (regardless if it's a developer or user, but IMO
it's more important for developers since we are all working on our
spare time) has to spend extra time to understand the commit. Or
ignore it, but that's a bad way of dealing with it IMO as it decreases
the motivation for interested people.

> But anyway, this thread is going nowhere. Being able to modify the log would
> be a good plus, for sure.

I don't think the possibility to modify commit messages would improve
the situation. If the commit message isn't completely bad small issues
like typos aren't a big deal IMO. From my point of view the main
problem is that there's no consensus how a commit message should look
like. It *seems* to be unspoken consensus that a commit message is
necessary at least. However, how should the message itself look like?
A description of commit messages I consider good is this one:
http://tbaggery.com/2008/04/19/a-note-about-git-commit-messages.html
(though I don't consider every point he makes important).

The important part is the question why you're writing commit messages
after all: it's to explain to others what (and maybe even why) you
did. It's not for yourself, but months or years later you could need
that explanation yourself as well.


 - Dominik
Received on 2010-09-15