After seeing people use the @jetbrains UI to commit to git I understand where all those - sorry: shitty - commit messages come from…
🙈
An improvement would already be to have a “Subject” line and the text box.
And have the subject line follow the Beams Rule.
Sonthat the first line of the commit message finishes the sentence
“When this commit is applied it will…”
And please: No longer than 56(?) characters (Unicode). Keep it short. You got the textbox to explain *why* in full length.
Software is not responsible for content. Software could help writing better commit messages, but at the end it is the developer who has to improve his messages and mindset.
A shitty text will keep shitty nevertheless if it’s written in a simple text editor or in Word 🤷♂️
IMO .gitmessage Templates can help - but it’s also not the solution. The solution sits in front of the monitor.
@heiglandreas @jetbrains@Xitnelat Indeed. But software can help.
After all an email editor also has different fields for different content, while it is perfectly possible to write an email.with a texteditor.
And while everything is possible, the “Subject line, empty line, Body (empty line, trailer)” is what it’s intended to be.
So why not help the person in front of the monitor with that…
/cc @jetbrains
@heiglandreas @jetbrains are you writing commit messages on a Nokia 3320? Even limiting at 80 had some meaning, but 56 is just an arbitrary low number that sometimes requires an English Masters degree to achieve.
56 characters is ridiculous 😂 We’re not in the hole-punching era of computing. We have screens with resolutions that can easily fit 200-300 characters horizontally. My wraps across nearly everything are 100 characters.
Even code at 80 characters I find a joke from the era of 80 character terminals forcing people to have variable names like
mCar,pItm,ctx,ptc,hln,vln,lfor list,mfor map and so on. Sure, it fits in 80 characters, but you might as well be reading obfuscated code.
One more reason why Git-Fork is the GOAT - it does have separate subject and description fields. Don’t lump all GUI tools in together and generalize
@Cyno IIRC I explicitly talked about the Jetbrains UI.
Others I didn’t check and mean! Sorry if it came across like that!
@heiglandreas @jetbrains What if you want to use Conventional Commits instead of Beams? 😉
@ramsey Just: Don’t.
The subject lines space is limited and should not be wasted for stuff that doesn’t belong there.
Also the prime idea behind conventional commits is to add machine readable info.to the commit message: Fine. Do so. The commit.meysage can be as long as you want. Add it there. Keep the subject line to the human readable part.
Also: Creating changelogs from.git.commits is *not* what chamgelogs are there for.
Keep a changelog can help on *that* front.
@ramsey @jetbrains I’m still prepping a talk just about commit messages. The Why, How, what nots and Caveats - experiences from decades of code archeology… 🙈
Might just pitch that to the next CfPs…
Why should I put manual effort into separately maintaining a changelog and a semantically meaningful commit history? If I’m going to manually maintain atomic commits with useful commit messages, why would I want the contents of those messages to be substantially different from the content of the relevant bullets of the changelog?
@BatmanAoD Because they serve a different purpose.
Purely semantically a changelog is something different than a git log (otherwise it would be named a git log).
The changelog is more a log of merges that describes the main overview of new features and also bug fixes.
If I want to know the exact details why this line of code changed, *then* I look at the git log.
Having all atomic commitlogs in the changelog tells the user that you are too busy fixing code to give them a meaningful summary
@BatmanAoD Besides that a git log and a changelog have different target audiences.
The gitlog is intended for contributors of the project whereas the chamgelog is intended for users of the project.
And it helps the users if they get a summarized version of what changed for them.without having to.go.theough each commit amd decide for themselves whether and how that internal change affects the exteenal API and then their usage of it.
The gitlog is intended for contributors of the project whereas the chamgelog is intended for users of the project.
That makes sense to me.
I think I would still argue, however, that for projects using github, gitlab, or any similar forge with a built-in pull-request + code-review feature, there’s very limited value in spending time crafting good commit messages in a feature branch. All information that you may be tempted to put there would be more visible and more useful either as code comments (which applies to all projects, not just GH) or as comments in the PR description or discussion. (I also think it’s often better to just squash feature branches on merge than to try to maintain a clean branch history while the feature is in development.)
I do think that the commit messages that actually end up on your trunk are important; but, with the exception of the final PR merge (or squash) commit, developers should minimize the time spent writing or thinking about these commit messages.
The one context in which I find details in historical commit messages potentially useful is when using
git log -pto figure out when and why something changed. But even then, once I’ve found the relevant commit, looking up the PR to see if there was any discussion about the change in question is generally the next step; so again, having substantial detail in the commit message itself is unlikely to be helpful.@BatmanAoD Having done code archeology for over a decade now I can assure you that the issue with all the information that you need to understand why something was done has been discarded just shortly before due to moving to a different platform… Or something similar.
In any case: Having all the relevant data in one place and not scattered is a huge advantage.
@BatmanAoD And every developer should take the time to create a meaningful commit-message for the work they did. After all they invested a good amount of time into the code change, so why not proudly explain why they did it, what the challenges where and why they did it
*that* way?But on the other hand: It’s documentation, so just drop it 🙈
Also: Code-comments are fine but tend to rot during code changes. The commit message is always tied to the commit.
I mean, I’ve been doing this for over a decade too. If teams are losing data from their issue tracker or source forge, that’s a deep problem and not something that can be ameliorated by writing better commit messages.
@heiglandreas @ramsey @jetbrains see, that’s exactly *why* IntelliJ shouldn’t have a default opinion on this. Why wouldn’t they choose these conventions? They’re popular.
Instead they should have the safest possible default, and let you easily configure your own conventions. When possible, by reading git configuration for anything standard. Which is what IntelliJ already does.
We might be talking about two different sets of standard. What I would want Jetbrains to support out of the box is the “Subject line, Blank Line, Body” convention that is recommended in the git docs.
People can happily change the defaults to whatever they want but the recommendation from git should IMO be the default.
/cc @ramsey @jetbrains
@heiglandreas @ramsey @jetbrains how do you expect IntelliJ to support this? When if the second line isn’t blank?
@clovis They already DO support it.
/cc @ramsey @jetbrains
@heiglandreas @ramsey @jetbrains what’s the problem then 😅
Whether the users then use conventional commits, beams rule, opensavvy, whatever else they want is a completely different question.
And I am absolutely with you that Jetbrains should not favour one over the other.
/cc @ramsey @jetbrains
