After seeing people use the @jetbrains UI to commit to git I understand where all those - sorry: shitty - commit messages come from…
🙈
An improvement would already be to have a “Subject” line and the text box.
And have the subject line follow the Beams Rule.
Sonthat the first line of the commit message finishes the sentence
“When this commit is applied it will…”
And please: No longer than 56(?) characters (Unicode). Keep it short. You got the textbox to explain *why* in full length.
@BatmanAoD Having done code archeology for over a decade now I can assure you that the issue with all the information that you need to understand why something was done has been discarded just shortly before due to moving to a different platform… Or something similar.
In any case: Having all the relevant data in one place and not scattered is a huge advantage.
@BatmanAoD And every developer should take the time to create a meaningful commit-message for the work they did. After all they invested a good amount of time into the code change, so why not proudly explain why they did it, what the challenges where and why they did it
*that* way?
But on the other hand: It’s documentation, so just drop it 🙈
Also: Code-comments are fine but tend to rot during code changes. The commit message is always tied to the commit.
It’s not documentation, though. That’s my point. It’s a byproduct of the development cycle, not a place to store important information.
Commit messages are tied to a commit, sure, but why do you expect developers to have better discipline in writing commit messages than they have in updating code comments?
@BatmanAoD Because the commit message is a requirement when committing code. The code comment is sitting there and no one cares whether it’S updated.
And a certain schema of a commit message can be enforced. Git hooks for example can be used to make sure that the commit message looks a certain way, has a minimum length, is formatted according to declared standards. As one would do for code-style.
Then they still can just add garbage. But then you have a people problem that no tech will solve
@BatmanAoD Because the commit message is a requirement when committing code. The code comment is sitting there and no one cares whether it’S updated.
And a certain schema of a commit message can be enforced. Git hooks for example can be used to make sure that the commit message looks a certain way, has a minimum length, is formatted according to declared standards. As one would do for code-style.
Then they still can just add garbage. But then you have a people problem that no tech will solve
@BatmanAoD And the commit message *is* documentation. It explains the “Why” making transparent why the code was written the way it is. If the commit message doesn’T reflect that, then you can also use
git commit -m "Fixed issues"But again: That is then a people problem that no tech will solve!
My point is that “the comments aren’t accurate” is also a people problem. And I absolutely disagree that commit messages are “documentation” of anything except the development history.
@BatmanAoD Oh I am absolutely with you that commit messages document the development history.
And there are valid cases for code-comments (I am a strong proponent of them) when they explain why something is solved in this specific way that would otherwise cause confusion when reading the code! But those tend to suffer from entropy 😁