What do you try to leave in your commit messages?

James Lorenzen had an excellent blog post about the importance of a descriptive commit comment. I can't agree more. Unfortunately, I think getting better at leaving better commit messages take trial and error — the way I've learned it is by getting frustrated by the lack of commit messages. So in the spirit of encouraging everyone (including myself) to do a better job, I thought I'd list up what I try to leave in the comments. .with-space LI { margin-top: 1em; } Bug ID. In fact, bug/commit association is so useful that often you use (or write) programs that analyze these relationship, so it's preferrable for this information to be machine readable. URL to the e-mail in the archive that prompted me to produce a change. In Hudson, often a conversation with users reveal an issue or an enhancement that results in a commit. This URL lets me retrieve the context of that change, and I find it tremendously useful. If the discussion of a change was in IM, not e-mail, I just paste the whole conversation log, as they don't have an URL. Ditto if the e-mail was sent to me privately. The input value and/or the environment that caused a misbehavior. In Hudson, I have this one method that needs to do some special casing for various application servers. When I later generalized it a bit more, commit messages that recorded the weird inputs from WebSphere, OC4J, and etc. turned out to be very useful...

Date: February, 25 2010
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/kohsuke/archive/2010/02/25/what-do-you-try-leave-your-commit-messages

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