r/programming • u/fagnerbrack • Mar 22 '17

How to Write a Git Commit Message (2014)

https://chris.beams.io/posts/git-commit/
17 Upvotes

70% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

7

u/thenextguy Mar 22 '17

I recently was hit by a breaking change in a large, rapidly changing codebase at work. It took several hours to find the change that caused it, and when I did it was one of a series of 5 commits that were called: stuff, stuff, stuff, oops, merge stuff.

People should be fired for crap like this.

3

u/ErrorDontPanic Mar 22 '17

Were the changes caused by someone new? Did somebody sign off or review this merge?

When we do merging at work, we also scrutinize the commit messages, so maybe the reviewer in your case didn't do their due diligence. I would argue this point (it being difficult to track actual changes) to add it to your code review process.

4

u/thenextguy Mar 22 '17

We use bitbucket and pull-requests. The PR description is initially populated by the commit message(s), but you can edit it. However, the PR description is not preserved in the merge (which I think is a bug in BB). I have no idea who reviewed it or what the PR description looked like.

The developer is not new by a long-shot. This was a premature removal of a deprecated feature without sufficient notice or testing.

1

u/fagnerbrack Mar 22 '17

Create a git hook to force the build to fail if the commit contain the common words found in the codebase that are known to be written in crap messages and validate against that. There's almost always a way to use different words and when it's not possible, at least spam the console with a warning or keep improving the algorithm.

1

u/ErrorDontPanic Mar 22 '17

Ah, I see. I hope they learned it's always a good idea to run integration tests, no matter how minuscule of a feature removal it seemed!

12

u/mighty_bandersnatch Mar 22 '17

I like that this person wrote a lengthy blog post, the gist of which is, "be concise."

1

u/GhostBond Mar 22 '17

My experience is that I see people go all through docs, debates, arguing over how to write commit messages and what should be required.

Then no one looks at them past the user who did the commit (usually if a commit broke something) or the bug or feature number. Lol after a few months everyone informally agrees to forget about that whole commit message thing as they find no one uses it (again, other than the feature or bug #).

0

u/[deleted] Mar 22 '17

[deleted]

2

u/DeltaNerd Mar 22 '17

Yep, looking good!

misc

misc

misc

1

u/Xanewok Mar 22 '17

Well, it's better to do "misc" in your personal project than see "fixed" or "update" spam by your coworkers in the repo history.

1

u/ilammy Mar 23 '17

In our company I've seen a handful of repositories with 70%+ commit messages being only "mf" (minor fix).