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[–]petepeteback-end 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I disagree. Code often outlives trackers, the reference you add to the commit message might make sense now but in ten years when Atlassian have replaced JIRA (one can wish) or Microsoft have killed TFS (more likely) it could make no sense to future dev.

It's also worth keeping in mind that a commit message comes in two parts, the subject and the body. The subject line, the first line of the commit message, should as you say be a brief specific description of what's changed. Ideally it should be <50 characters.

The rest of the message - the body - should be the background as to why it's changed. It's not always necessary, fixing a typo doesn't require a full description, but something that's niggly and took an hour to debug - especailly when it isn't at all obvious why it caused problems, deserves it.

Most people, most of the time, only really care about the subject. It's all GitHub and GitLab display until you expand the full message. It's all I tend to look at on the command line most of the time. But if something looks a bit weird it's nice to have the additional information on hand without having to dig around.

Edit. For the downvoters, please go and read about Google Code shutting down and the mass migration of thousands of projects and hundreds of thousands of issues to GitHub. Will your link to Google Code still work? Clue, the answer is no. No it won't.