These sorts of prescriptions always strike me as the sort of fastidiousness that some software developer types are stereotyped with.
Just once I would like to read someone that takes a descriptivist approach to commit messages instead of a prescriptivist approach. I would prefer even a scientific approach where someone sets out to measure if these sorts of measures have a concrete measurable effect beyond people's anecdotal preferences.
Prescribing what a commit message can look like implicitly prescribes what a commit can look like and that turns a flexible tool into a less flexible one. For many people, lack of flexibility can be a feature... but it is an empirical question on whether or not if it aids development and I am not really aware of anyone trying to measure these things. In the spirit of "No silver bullet," by Fred Brooks, I am skeptical that between the code comments, the code documentation, and the ticketing system that the git commits are adding much.
Best comment I read so far on this. Taken a stage further, a well written codebase of self-documenting tdd’d clean code and commit messages become moderately useless. For all the effort they take and the rare occasion they aid in finding something useful, a completely blank entry for every commit is arguably more efficient. In the spirit of it only taking a few seconds whilst your head is in that space, a short brain dump of what it is in any format you like is an excellent and efficient choice.
There does seem to be a strong lure to the ease of cargo-culting over being thoughtful. I guess I am always surprised that it is such a problem in software development because we pride ourselves on using our minds to solve problems.
Just once I would like to read someone that takes a descriptivist approach to commit messages instead of a prescriptivist approach. I would prefer even a scientific approach where someone sets out to measure if these sorts of measures have a concrete measurable effect beyond people's anecdotal preferences.
Prescribing what a commit message can look like implicitly prescribes what a commit can look like and that turns a flexible tool into a less flexible one. For many people, lack of flexibility can be a feature... but it is an empirical question on whether or not if it aids development and I am not really aware of anyone trying to measure these things. In the spirit of "No silver bullet," by Fred Brooks, I am skeptical that between the code comments, the code documentation, and the ticketing system that the git commits are adding much.