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Discussion on: Write Git Commit Messages That Your Colleagues Will Love

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Igor Pellegrini

I also was hoping in more juice about the body. It's a whole topic itself.
Commit titles are imho easy to write; and they don't really solve the "lack of context" problem. That's what commit body is for: the details that one will spend hours/days to guess/investigate by themselves.

Stuff like:

  • examples of a newly added command with description of options/parameters (as most of the times we don't add enough markdown documentation)
  • a reference to multiple tickets or, better, special keywords to interact with rather than just referring them (e.g. close a ticket with a commit). Or even references to multiple ticketing systems (I use Redmine for corporate collaboration and Gitlab issues more for self-management)
  • TODOs or missing features (as described above, an Issue Tracking System might not be available one day)
  • insights on what dirty detail of the code forced to perform the changes brought by the commit
  • if it makes sense to use Markdown or formatted code in the commit body (sometimes it does)
  • what kind of URLs or references makes sense to add

There are just some of the aspects that I find myself dealing with into commits' body.