Mine look similar except the body is mostly “the X was doing Y, but it should’ve been doing Z” or “the docs say bla, $link”. I try to separate the individual “update A to do B” in separate commits, but sometimes it just isn’t possible.
We squash everything (and rebase rather than merge) so I don’t worry much about the individual commits. I like that main is pretty concise and doesn’t have a ton of work-in-progess stuff in the log.
We are mortal enemies you and I 😄 I’d much rather have a descriptive commit history than huge commits which make git blame meaningless. Function over beauty for me.
A nemesis! I’m pretty lucky I guess that no one at my workplace has strong git opinions that differ
Do you have multiple people’s commits being squashed together? Or how is blame being made useless for you? I’m at a rather small company where generally it’s just one person working on a thing at a time. The blame will point to their squashed commit that, if they wrote a good message like the top of this thread, will give you a lot of context.
Imagine finding a bug in angularjs, doing a git blame and finding this commit
feat(module): new module loader
211 changed files with 1,051 additions and 1,242 deletions.
AngularJS isn’t even the worst offender. I’ve seen backports of multiple fixes getting squashed into one commit for “a clean history” with all the useful commit messages ending up in one commit.
Many user stories I’ve seen implemented in a sprint take multiple days to write. Sometimes they have 5+ commits with a multitude of files changed and (if done right) each commit has an explanation why something was done or at least what was done. Having a granular view of changes also allows finding related changes quickly with less code to read.
If someone changes the implementation of a function call in one commit and it introduces a bug, it’s nice to have only that change instead of the entire class with it and changes in other files too. Additional changes mean now you have to read through more code to be sure that the function implementation change was not done due to a modification of the class or whatever else was changed which might be the actual source of the problem.
IMO squashing commits has its uses. It’s a tool in a toolbox, but it’s not the only tool.
My squashed commit messages typically enumerate everything I changed and why.
IMO squashing commits has its uses. It’s a tool in a toolbox, but it’s not the only tool.
I think we agree on this.
One case that has come up for me several times: working on a feature, committing as I go. And then I realize some of what I did won’t work or isn’t what product actually wants. Leaving those commits in the history that show the function doing the wrong thing would be misleading. Especially if that was never actually in production or left my local machine.
I guess I have an unspoken belief that every commit on main should work, but you could achieve that with tags instead.
I was recently spelunking to try to find why something in old code was the way it was. I found the commit where they changed the line, but it was orphaned from the larger context. The message didn’t say more than like “change field from footype to bartype”, but not why. So I had to try to piece together what other changes were part of this change. If it had been a single commit that showed them like adding the new field, new model, and whatnot, it would have been clearer to me that those things all go together.
There is a debate to be had about how far this is morally acceptable. If you‘re trying to promote your nonprofit and ask friends to ask their friends to look at it I‘d say thats fine.
But asking bluntly for fake reviews is not ok imo. I‘d report this person immediately. I‘d rather make a nice post on every social media platform that fits my topic and plainly ask folks for feedback. This just seems lazy and uninspired.
Generally, yes. I’m not gonna infringe on someone else’s actions as long as they dont endanger someone (themselves or other) because its not up to me (or anyone else) to be helicopter parents and “correct” everyone else.
As I said, I would report this person immediately.
imo it’s fine if its something like sub for sub on youtube, or follow for follow on twitch, where you’re manipulating an algorithm, but with reviews it’s misleading people and not okay.
When there’s a limit to the size of a commit message it does make it difficult to actually list all the changes, so sometimes this is all you can write.
I know in theory you’re meant to commit little and often, but in practice it doesn’t always work out that way.
Even if you have a big commit, you can always write something more descriptive than this. And commit messages can be huge, so the limit shouldn’t be an excuse to write a useless message.
For those wondering how to exceed the 70 (80) recommended character limit and still follow best practices:
Write the title on the first line, keep below 70 characters.
Make two (2) newlines
Write one or more descriptive paragraphs.
The first line will be shown as commit message, and the full text can usually be viewed by checking out the commit. Sentences can span multiple lines, but try to keep the line length below 70 characters for best readability.
This off the top of my head, so feel free to correct me if I’ve misremembered the best practices.
I generally write a single line summary and then a list of the specifics like:
Did stuff (except more detailed than that)
- The first thing I did
- Maybe some more detail about the first thing because there's a rationale to explain
- The second thing I did
- Third thing
Changelogs are published to stakeholders. So what I’m saying is you don’t have to try to enforce a commit style using got hooks if you have public shaming at your disposal.
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