Committing in Git is The Future
Whatever you write in your git commit history is what you’ll be going back to at some point in the future to understand how the source code got to where it’s at now.
There are a couple of things that seem to work well when managing commits in git:
- Don’t have more commits than tell the story – so squash commits on a feature branch into a single final commit before merging
- Try to keep the tree clean – so rebase, or force master fast-forward merges, so the commit history of your main branch is a series of revertable individual commits
- Make your commit message tell their story well
Let’s look at the last one – the perfect commit message.
The Imperfect Commit Message
Don’t blether. Don’t treat it with disrespect. Don’t just commit with the branch name, and definitely look at http://www.whatthecommit.com/ for inspiration on what bad looks like
I just got:
bumping poms
A Great Commit Message
Here are some guidelines:
- Title the commit with a short, imperative statement, as though commanding the developer who made the change
- E.g. “Add support for versioned schemata”
- E.g. “Fix slow performance with multiple threads”
- Optionally, add some narrative underneath, perhaps in bullet point form
Good Commit Messages
One Liner
1 | Add cache to the schema loader to speed things up |
Heading and Detail
1 2 3 | Remove unused libraries- commons lang no longer needed- switch to default jackson in place of override |
Bad Commit Messages
A Who Cares Message
1 | Updated the code |
WHERE’S THE TEXT?
1 | Ticket #127 |
Vague and non imperative
1 | Fixed bug |
Non Imperative
1 | Fixing the bugs reported by users in the calculation module |
Essay
1 | I decided to update the library version and put some notes in the README to that effect. This resulted in no obvious test failures. |
Conclusion
Commit messages are only important when they’re important, at which point they’re mission critical. Getting your public commit history into a sensible shape, with pithy headlines, will give the optimum benefit to your future self and your code reviewers.
Published on Java Code Geeks with permission by Ashley Frieze, partner at our JCG program. See the original article here: What The Commit!? Opinions expressed by Java Code Geeks contributors are their own. |
