On Thu, Mar 09, 2017 at 05:50:36PM -0500, Ehsan Akhgari wrote: > > On the subject of long commit messages, here's a commit message I wrote > > that had 3 paragraphs to explain a patch that just changed a 0 to a 1: > > https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/bf059ec2bdc9 > > I think the length of the commit message is entirely missing the point. > "Typo fix" is a perfectly fine commit message depending on the commit. > The point is helping the reviewer and future readers of the commit to > understand what it is that it's doing...
Come to think of it, I think there are two orthogonal goals, and that only one of them should be addressed in commit messages. - why the code has been changed. - what the code is doing. The former belongs in the commit message, but the latter, most of the time, belongs in code comments. It's painful to figure out why some tricky code works the way it works by looking at its history (which usually requires jumping through several commits before finding the one that actually introduced the code), when it could have been spelled out in a comment. Mike _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
