

Notes on Writing Good Commit Messages - bradly
http://gist.github.com/539516

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muyyatin
Is there any justification for preferring present tenses over past tenses?

Past tense ("Fixed ...") makes more sense when looking at a report of what was
done.

~~~
tomstuart
The most objective justification is that Git uses the present tense when it
generates its own commit messages ("Merge branch...", "Revert..."), so using
the same tense for your commit messages makes everything consistent.

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donaq
As long as it's clear and succinct, does this really matter?

~~~
draebek
In Git, at least, some commands expect the first line of the commit message to
be meaningful and self-contained. For example, `git log --oneline`. Following
the custom of making the first line a short summary makes some tools more
useful. (Emphasis on "short": eighty column width windows are very common.)

~~~
jakevoytko
In addition to Git, "first line as a summary" appears in a few other places -
for instance, Mercurial's 'log' command prints just the first line by default.
Following the guidelines in this Gist helps future-proof your project history
against other tools, and helps developers using your code with some conversion
tool.

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mkramlich
another rule about commit messages I find useful, esp if you have a multi-
national team or a random revolving pool of remote contractors, is to require
that they always be in English. Along with code comments and docs.

i also sometime like to see a prefix indicating area like "GUI: blah" or "zfs:
blah" so you can quickly categorize or get a sense for what area or subsystem
was touched, if just looking at the messages and not the files changed.

~~~
muyyatin
I've also found prefixing with the category extremely helpful, even for
looking through my own commit logs.

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alagu
The title should have the prefix "GIT only"

