There’s a useful conversation happening in an internal Automattic P2 I thought I’d take the liberty to share.

From Mike:

Consider the audience when you write a commit message. What is that audience? It’s at least two groups of people:

• Your coworkers: You’re telling everyone else what you did. Commit messages are one to many, asynchronous and textual. Sounds like email, so write the commit message like an email. The first line should be a descriptive subject. The next line should be blank (as a separator). Then comes the body of the message. Write everything as if you’re describing it to Nikolay.
• Your future self: Think back on the times you were fixing something and needed to understand why an old commit was made. How often was the commit message useful? How often was it your own useless commit message? The commit message should say what the problem was (repro steps?), how you fixed it (briefly – the code itself gives more details), and why you changed what you did. That way the shiny pants people of the future have the information they need to decide if they can safely change your code.

From Matt:

I think as a company we need better commit messages. Very often in our messages we say what is happening but not the why, and most importantly the context of the change. I’m going to pick on this changeset, but you could really pick almost anything:

[link to changeset]

4 lines changed, with the message:

“Fixing incorrect $blogid variable, should be $blog_id.
Check if $current_blog is === false before trying to reset it.”

First a good thing: it’s a multi-line message, which is nice. Commit messages can use as many lines as you like, and be as verbose as you like.

However if I were to come across this changeset 3 years from now, say if I were debugging a similar area in the code, I’d have no idea why this change happened. The message might as well be blank, since it doesn’t really say anything I couldn’t tell in 2 seconds from looking at the diff. Some useful context would be:

• What bug did this code cause? (This is most important.) Why change it?
• Is there a relevant discussion, either on a P2 or in Trac?
• Who was involved in the fix, IE who else would have context for this change either because they reported the bug or reviewed the fix.

From Lance:

Good commit messages are my gospel. The actual syntax should vary by context, though. For theme commits, for example, we always start with the theme name up front.

But, the goal of giving context and pointing to related items is key.

I personally don’t think long commit messages are better. Instead, point to a Trac ticket or P2 post with all the gory details.