Was digging through a project at work today where some guy in 2014 made 100+ commits in a single day and the only one that had a comment said “upgrading to v4.0”.
[JIRA-123] Quick summary of objective
Justification (if applicable) Bulleted, high-level overview of important bits Any relevant test results done that won’t also be done in CI
I’ve had commits called fuck
- “progress on [1], fixed linting [2]”
- “[1] completed, setup for [2]”
- “[3] and [4] completed”
- “fixed formatting”
- “refactoring [1] and [2]”
- “fix variable typos”
- “update logic in [2]”
- “revert package.json and regenerate package-lock”
All my commits have comments. I generally commit after completing a ‘block’ objective, a describe what that was but in very simple terms mostly in regards to the file/section with the most significant logic changes. I don’t always specify the file if I did tiny typos/linting/annotation across a bunch of them, because the logic is unaffected I know that the differences will be visible in the commit history.
My weakness is that I don’t do it often enough. If I’m working on [2] for several hours, I’ll only commit when I consider it minimally-viable (completed 2), or when moving between machines ([further] progress on 2). And I have a bad habit of not pushing every time I commit, just at the end of the day or when moving between machines (though a messy rebase hopefully made that lesson stick), or if somebody else on the team wants to review an issue I’m having.
I try to follow https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0/
For me, the need it: when production is on fire, as a responsible person, I want to be able to understand why the change of this commit has been made. Perhaps also what were the drivers of the implementation.
I also have this onliner to commit and push each 10min:
watch -n 60 'git add . ; git commit --allow-empty-message -m "" ; git push'
But those commits would never be merge as they are to master or main. It’s just if I loose work on my laptop. Worst case a
git rebase HEAD~
has to be done before the PR review.Conventional commits all the way! Even if I don’t use the keywords (feat, fix, etc.) I always write the comment in imperative tense; the message should tell you what happens if you merge it.
I totally agree.
Right now I’m on a new project with a teammate who likes to rebase PR branches, and merge with merge commits to “record a clean history of development”. It’s not quite compatible with the atomic-change philosophy of conventional commits. I’m thinking about making a case to change style, but I’ve already failed to argue the problem of disruption when rebasing PR branches.
Enforced by pre-commit, conventional commits has cleaned up our commit logs and changelog so much.
That’s pretty neat. Is there a forked version that adds ticket number as a mandatory first class citizen? Cause that’d be darn near perfect.
The change written as a command
Until I get frustrated by something and just start committing “yeet”
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I feel like this might be a good case for LLMs… Auto git commit suggestions based on the diff.
There are already some attempts but I don’t think it will work, harmful even. Best case scenario, the AI can understand the code as well as a senior engineer from another company. All they can know without the context is what was changed, which is useless. We need the reason why the commit was made, not what was changed. The info is not there in the first place for the AI to try to extract.
@CanadianNomad @lucas Awesome idea, yeah I can totally see that working well :)
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If it does, I haven’t seen it… I’d be happy to test drive it.
git commit -m “minor tweaks”
+3,276 -4,724
I had one of those and it was two in the night and I was tired and forgot what I did and committed
stuff, I dunno
.But normally I’m a good boy and prefix with the ticked id and write down the change and attempted fix.
Bug fixes. Too many to count.
When I eventually (usually) rebase, declarative statements of what the commit would accomplish if applied.
When I am testing CICD or generally need to push more frequently for whatever reason, it’s humor and angst all the way.
Ffffffuuuuuuuuu
Pls, why
Okay yeah that was important I guess.
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
I simply commit to master with the message “git commit”.
ah so you are the dev from 2014
I call it job security
Like the default Merge messages that git creates.
“Add some new feature” “Fix this and that” “Refactor XY code”
Not “Adding”, “fixed”, “Refactors” or anything…
You get two options.
Normally it’s a squashed commit of everything in a feature, with a commit message like:
[JIRA-1234] - Descriptive but Concise Name of Feature
But every now and then it’s multiple commits like:
quick fix Ugh, fix typo fuck fuck why doesn’t it work Oh, I’m stupid
Followed by
fixed formatting
final formatting fix
you gotta be kidding me, fuck you, detekt!
Bro, squash merge
Or if you’re using feature branches, rebase, squash, and force push before opening the MR
Sure, but before squashing you gotta commit
Looking at the log of my solo project, I could say the formula of my commit message is
Verb
theSubject
, theVerb
being Added/Tweaked/Removed, etc., and the subject of what is being changed. As I’m usinggit commit -m 'Message'
GNU Bash every time (none of the clients tend to work well for me + git self-hosting practice over SSH), I just try to make one-liners and without entering an external editor.Although my professional experience is scarce. For most of the time, I’ve been creating but not maintaining my projects. My projects do not have a decent high-level structure, I do not test my codebase, I learn my code by heart and follow intuition. I tend to think in algorithms, rather than structural design patterns. Even for my newest project, the main.rs is bloated, the functions are not in the correct modules (a.k.a. files), the modules are improperly named. Alhough, I cannot believe in myself I am approaching 3.5K lines of code (separated over two repositories) but I can still navigate…
I like my company’s style:
For issues:
<jira ticket> - [program][deliverable] did this to fix that
Problem: symptoms of the problem that future devs can use to figure out its the same problem
Root cause: why this is broken
Solution: how I fixed it, including the scope
Testing: what testing it has it gone through
ah nice. we include the backlog # in our branch name.
My commits tend to be pretty verbose. Here’s an example log from one of my projects.
I follow the standard imperative style for the commit title, and then I use the body to summarize any important internal changes, reflect on the overall project status (for example, what milestones this commit crosses or what other work it might enable or require), and state what I’m going to work on next. I’m sure some people find it too wordy, but I like having the commit history show lots of details about the overall status.
Edit: I always have a descriptive summary, i.e., never one word commits or similar.
Woa…
you are a pro and I aspire to be you
I’m not sure I do. I wouldn’t want to read all that just to find the item that broke. Might be faster to read the code.
That’s why
git log --oneline
exists ;)I use
alias gl='git log --graph --abbrev-commit --no-decorate --date=format:'\''%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'\'' --format=format:'\''%C(8)%>|(16)%h %C(7)%ad %C(8)%<(16,trunc)%an %C(auto)%d %>|(1)%s'\'' --all'
It will change your world.That is sexy. My only problem is that I tend to run my Git operations in a pretty small
tmux
pane on the side of my editing pane, so that layout ends up being too wide to fit well. I’ll definitely keep that alias around for when I have a full screen though!Haha yea I have written a number of
git
anddocker
aliases over the years that are permanently in mydotfiles
. I’m always inscreen
but perhaps will get into this newfangledtmux
.