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It's a lot easier, in a code review, to ask for a detailed commit message that conforms to a certain format, than to say things like, "can you add comments?" Which line or change deserves a comment is subjective.

In my open source projects, I use GNU ChangeLog format in the log messages. This mentions every file that is touched, and every defined entity (function, type, macro, variable, ...). In a code review, while it would still be difficult to enforce the quality of what is written about these things in the comment due to subjective reasons, there are objective aspects to it. When reviewing, you can point out something like "you changed the initializer of global variable g_foo, but it's not mentioned in the commit message".

Sure, API comment headers can be enforced reviews. But those are not the comments this discussion is about (and elsewhere I identified these as necessary comments that can't be farmed out into the git log messages).




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