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”.
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.
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…
Looking at the log of my solo project, I could say the formula of my commit message is Verb the Subject, the Verb being Added/Tweaked/Removed, etc., and the subject of what is being changed. As I’m using git 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…
Literally about 90% of the commits I’ve pushed on my DayZ server’s configs and mod files are just marked ‘a’. The actual mod updates I almost never have made porch notes for. Trying to be a little more informative for my new D&D based Conan Exiles server.
It still looks better than how I used to name things in flash.
