What The Commit provides a list of all-purpose messages to randomly select between. Would these be better?
this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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๐ซฃ $(rm -rvf .)
About what my coworkers do but even worse with stuff like "save" and "fix"
My commits when merged into main generally read like
[Ticket-123] Summary of what was done. Eg: Return user foo property in bar endpoint
- update bar view to return new foo key
- update foobrinator to determine foo property
- update tests
It takes an extra minute or two but it's more informative for the team / future me.
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 ๐ 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.
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.
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