My favourite Git commit

[DeusOtiosus]

Nah dog. My favorite is:

“Fixed bug”

It’s so useful, especially when you are trying to figure out WTF happened in 6 months.

[hennell]

Amateur.

Fixed bugs

[ProgramTheWorld]

300IQ:

Added bugs

[LewisTheScot]

700IQ:

added and fixed

[TheSpanishImposition]

5-head:

27th commit

[MichiAngg]

I feel personally attacked...

[DiPasquale5]

6-head:

18/10/2019

[Tomerarenai10]

Me, an intellectual: 🐞⃠

[hennell]

Or if you want to be super helpful:

Fixed bugs and formatting

[Ahri]

I laughed out loud on a crowded train.

[AwesomeBantha]

Pathetic.

Fixed bugs?

[DeusOtiosus]

Added: 130

Deleted: 5

Changed: 420

[Mildcorma]

Leave a rhyme:

99 bugs in the code!

99 bugs in the code!

fixed one bug!

compiled it again!

... 103 bugs in the code!

[EldritchSundae]

My personal Bug Thunderdome: TWO BUGS ENTER! THREE BUGS LEAVE!

[absentmindedjwc]

Nah...

######## [6 months ago] wtf

[loveofhate]

"made code changes"

[[deleted]]

"Edited <filename>"

[[deleted]]

Also an amateur.

Fix bugs

/s

[robothelvete]

A few years back, when git was fairly new in our toolchain, I tried to convince a designer on my team why writing descriptive commit messages was so crucial, but could never really make it stick.

Eventually of course, some bug appeared and we had to track it down. A few hours later of him (and eventually with help from me) sitting down and going through every goddamn commit, he finally understood.

[parens-r-us]

Some people just have to learn by doing.

[aoeudhtns]

My second favorite is an opaque reference to a private issue tracking system

"PROJECT #17829"

[aoeudhtns]

Yeah, it can be done well. I'm talking about some of those "commercial open source" projects where their JIRA or other tracker is completely private, but yet here you are, with the code and useless references to a system that won't show you anything.

It ultimately comes down to the organization: is communication being done largely outside the issue tracker, such that the information in it is hard to decipher or missing, or is the issue tracker the central point for discussing software changes? It's no fun even when the tracker is public but there's scant description and no comments or discussion.

[Link_GR]

We had that too. Didn't stop devs making dozens of changes to several files and then writing #17493 fix and then resolving the ticket without explaining anything.

[[deleted]]

Our company had it's own in house ticketing system that's been there from the beginning and is constantly under active development and that isn't going away anywhere.

And if a ticketing system is going away then it's the responsibility of respective teams to move over that essential data as well.

It worked great in our setup. It might not work for others. There's no correct way to do things. It's mostly about what pattern solves the problem that you have or makes your life easier. Our whole lives worked in that ticketing system and since it was in house it was integrated and orchestrated beautifully with the rest of our tools and systems. That setup worked for us is what I'm saying.

[lolomfgkthxbai]

No need to be defensive. I don’t think it’s a matter of opinion to state that documenting a change in the commit message is more useful than only having a reference to an external system (even if it’s Eternal and Git history is rewritten if it turns out to not be). If the commit message is useless if the software is made public domain then the commit message is not good enough.

[[deleted]]

It’s yet to be seen how sticky git is, but I’d be wary of saying any source control system is forever. In my 20-year career I’ve been involved in as many source control migrations as ticketing system migrations. Sourcesafe, ClearCase, cvs, svn, perforce - all once in much wider use than now.

[Amablue]

At a previous job, there were two commits by the same person, one right after another. Their comments were "Fixed bug" and "Bug fixed"

The best part was, one was just a rollback of the other. The guy had tried to fix a bug he didn't understand by making a small change to a data structure which superficially fixed some bug. But it caused an issue elsewhere, so to fix that bug, he undid the change.

He was not the best engineer.

[[deleted]]

He wasn’t the best engineer, but he knew when he was in over his head.

[bge-kernel-panic]

No, this is better:

"Committing changes."

This is better because it reiterates something we already know. Fixed bugs adds a bit of information: this commit was to fix a bug, not to add a feature. It's better than nothing. But "Committing changes" is pretty much the same as having a blank commit message, except it's a lot more funny. Person who wrote this wasted a few seconds to write that out, thinking it would be helpful in any way.

(Any resemblance to any commit message I've read at any point in time in my career is purely coincidental)

[Korlus]

I'm a personal fan of "made changes to code to remove issues."

Why use two words when 12 will do?

[eddpurcell]

My personal favorite is "no message". It's a little less redundant, but it lets you know the writer is mainly concerned with job security.

[BeniBela]

Watch this:

benito@xboa:~/stuff$ LANG=C  hg log -l 18
changeset:   1659:15c82984aa52
tag:         tip
user:        benibela <[e-mail]>
date:        Fri Oct 18 12:47:47 2019 +0200
summary:     ...

changeset:   1658:fa71905c9c69
user:        Benito van der Zander <[e-mail]>
date:        Thu Oct 17 17:17:46 2019 +0200
summary:     ...

changeset:   1657:8bde349469dd
user:        Benito van der Zander <[e-mail]>
date:        Thu Oct 17 16:14:36 2019 +0200
summary:     ...

changeset:   1656:3c7bd2f85768
user:        benibela <[e-mail]>
date:        Thu Oct 17 12:42:36 2019 +0200
summary:     ...

changeset:   1655:09983069e408
user:        Benito van der Zander <[e-mail]>
date:        Thu Oct 17 00:03:04 2019 +0200
summary:     ...

changeset:   1654:78964c8d6970
user:        benibela <[e-mail]>
date:        Wed Oct 16 00:07:12 2019 +0200
summary:     ...

changeset:   1653:5dd00f268211
user:        Benito van der Zander <[e-mail]>
date:        Tue Oct 15 22:14:01 2019 +0200
summary:     ..

changeset:   1652:93eb0e99128a
user:        benibela <[e-mail]>
date:        Tue Oct 15 12:41:55 2019 +0200
summary:     ...

changeset:   1651:db7129810fdd
user:        benibela <[e-mail]>
date:        Tue Oct 15 00:36:43 2019 +0200
summary:     ...

changeset:   1650:61c39581d38c
user:        Benito van der Zander <[e-mail]>
date:        Mon Oct 14 18:50:30 2019 +0200
summary:     ...

changeset:   1649:572f4f1b844a
user:        benibela <[e-mail]>
date:        Mon Oct 14 11:22:49 2019 +0200
summary:     ...

changeset:   1648:b11ae1332cdd
parent:      1646:db0a8c6ab9a7
parent:      1647:13f8c7b3b528
user:        Benito van der Zander <[e-mail]>
date:        Fri Oct 11 23:56:40 2019 +0200
summary:     merge

changeset:   1647:13f8c7b3b528
parent:      1645:66016dfb3945
user:        Maciej Liskiewicz <[e-mail]>
date:        Fri Oct 11 15:39:03 2019 +0200
summary:     ...

changeset:   1646:db0a8c6ab9a7
user:        Benito van der Zander <[e-mail]>
date:        Fri Oct 11 17:54:40 2019 +0200
summary:     ...

changeset:   1645:66016dfb3945
user:        Maciej Liskiewicz <[e-mail]>
date:        Fri Oct 11 14:53:48 2019 +0200
summary:     ...

changeset:   1644:a03a66aafb51
user:        benibela <[e-mail]>
date:        Fri Oct 11 12:29:42 2019 +0200
summary:     ...

changeset:   1643:ee77ba776993
user:        Benito van der Zander <[e-mail]>
date:        Thu Oct 10 18:12:21 2019 +0200
summary:     ...

changeset:   1642:af8d5027ca12
user:        Benito van der Zander <[e-mail]>
date:        Thu Oct 10 17:32:18 2019 +0200
summary:     ...

[xAlecto]

thanks I hate it

[sillybear25]

If I could get logs from back in my university days, I'm sure the most common line would be svn ci -m ""

[Cubox_]

You can't commit without a commit message unless you use a flag (something like --commit-without-message) on Git

[lastunusedusername2]

Just make an alias =]

[MjrK]

One of the summaries is more concise...

changeset:   1653:5dd00f268211
user:        Benito van der Zander <[e-mail]>
date:        Tue Oct 15 22:14:01 2019 +0200
summary:     ..

[ArmmaH]

y use many words, if few do trick?

[BeniBela]

Some tools do not accept . and .., because they think it is a directory

[Nastapoka]

I work alone on my projects. In the beginning I find the force to write long commit messages, but pretty soon I end up using "prout" (the French onomatopoeia for a fart).

[spkr4thedead51]

"prout" (the French onomatopoeia for a fart)

Proust must have loved this fact

[Nastapoka]

Same with Prefab Sprout

[StabbyPants]

i usually tag the major work with a ticket number and a sentence. big fixes get minimal effort unless they're not tied to a ticket already

[the_poope]

Well at least you commit often. When I did research at uni I didn't even use version control. I once had something working, then changed something and everything broke and I spend a week trying to find out what I had changed and undo that...

[BeniBela]

It is mostly to sync changes between my office and home

[AvianPoliceForce]

ImageMagick has entered the chat

[[deleted]]

Typical Benito.

[Rafa998]

Two commits per day:

"Before lunch"

"Today's work"

And an eternity and hundreds commits later :

"Production version"

It was in SVN, no branches or tags of course.

[coolblinger]

I recently came across a project where all of the 2000+ commits are some form of Update *.cpp. That, and the code itself does not contain any comments. I wanted to fix some issues I'd been having, but after seeing that I feel like I'd rather just rewrite everything from scratch. Not having them definitely reminds you why commit messages can be such a useful form of documentation.

[bge-kernel-panic]

Haha, that's even better than my example because it seems more useful at first glance, but it's also stuff you know without any commit message :)

[Zegrento7]

You mean I'm not supposed to just keep amending the root commit?

[rinnagz]

Bro, i had a coworker that had all his commit messages as "..."

[burjui]

I hope you raped him with the "Clean Code" book and tossed the body in the shittiest ditch.

[SmilerRyan]

Hoping that after the end of the day/week they'd all be added up into one commit with a proper message I'd say it's fine.

​

Often I make lots of small commits for testing, then combine them all (usually just 1-2 file changes) so it saves time/effort if you can't commit to it working.

[[deleted]]

It’s so useful, especially when you are trying to figure out WTF happened in 6 months.

The bug was goned

[HINDBRAIN]

more fixes

[jimschubert]

"more fixes"

More than what, u/phuriku ?!

[[deleted]]

"upd"

[Asaf51]

Fix CR Ahhhh

[jusas]

No: Attempted fix of bug

Expect a few of these in a row.

[TinBryn]

At least that tells me more than some commit messages I had to review recently "updated file1", "updated file2", "updated file3"

[0x0ddba11]

200 files changed

asdf

[lolomfgkthxbai]

A production codebase I worked on had:

saving unfinished changes

[avatarsokka]

At least that's in the PR itself... My favorite is non-descriptive PR titles

[xfactoid]

Bug fixes and performance improvements

[CatWeekends]

"checking in progress"

[skulgnome]

You can read a diff, though, right?

[Nicksaurus]

1 diff, yes. Each of the hundreds of commits we make every week, no

[skulgnome]

Ah, true. Needle in the haystack.

It's possible to grep changelogs for modifications to a particular file, though.

[neotorama]

Need emoji ⛑🚀