DEV Community

Discussion on: How much effort do you put into commit messages?

Collapse
 
eelstork profile image
Tea

There are conventions; without going semantic versioning all the way:

  • 50 chars max is considered good practice (yes that is extremely terse and I treat it as an ideal vs hard constraint)
  • A good commit fixes/adds one thing (and a good message concisely spells this out) imho bothering to detail commits beyond the terse one liner often signals an issue with the commit itself (not always)

In a team environment:

  • Except under duress/time pressure will not skimp on the extra time needed to write a concise, informative commit message.
  • Will definitely review commits more carefully if a concise, informative message is not provided (and likely to ask for an updated diff)

Own work: will stop and ask myself what's going on when I err on the "improved a thing" side of things for any length of time as this could signal I'm losing focus or trying to muddle through/conflating separate issues.