Write Better SVN (or GIT) Commit Messages
I was browsing various open source projects on GitHub last night and it was interesting to see the variation in submit comments.
The comments that seemed the most useful were ones that described the end result rather than how it was achieved. For example
updated readme
...would become...
The README file is now up to date.
It looks better in context, see the Iron Nails .NET project on GitHub.
It's a suble difference, but important.
I also think repositories look far nicer when commit comments start with upper case. Yeah yeah that's anal I know :)
Comments
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I’m the opposite; I’d rather track what I (think I) did.
I agree that things should be complete sentences, though, particularly when they’re used as part of the release notes.
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I agree with Tobin. Looking back at my own project, which has seen several wildly different programmers do unspeakable things to the code over the last three years or so, reading the SVN commit logs is a major headache. Only one guy (and that wasn’t me) actually wrote what he did, instead of how he did it—and his code is by far the most readable, too. I branched the project and am now strictly writing simplistic, descriptive comments (call them “abstracts” if you will). Knowing myself, in about three weeks’ time, I will be saving on a lot of head-scratching (hence on shampoo, hence real moneys).