Git commit message styleguide | Hacker News Reader

Git commit message styleguide

github.com

44 pointssheldor35 comments

Please don't do this. :lipstick: :sparkles: has absolutely no meaning when I'm working in a clone of your project, on the terminal, without access to the Internet.

I think it would be great to standardize (or at least widely adopt) some conventions for commit messages, especially with respect to tagging that isn't easily expressed by the "FOO: Imperative bar" style. Let's do it with plain text, not cute icons that get rendered differently (or not at all) depending on the OS or client you're on.

For those who don't know, this is a joke, poking fun at the commit style sometimes used on github, versus git's recommended style.

(Edit: Here's a link to a style guide in git's documentation, for example: https://www.git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Distributed-Git-Contribut...)

Are you sure it's a joke? Pretty sure it's serious

> Use Valid MarkDown format in Message Body.

I like to keep Markdown away from my repos. After a while people get clever with their Markdown and it makes reading commit logs using command-line tools increasingly difficult. It also encourages writing things into commit logs that would be better suited for documentation.

Edit: apparently it's not a Github specific thing.

I don't believe GitHub renders commit messages as Markdown.

I tried and you're right. Did they disable that recently? Or is there a popular IDE that does render Markdown in commit messages? I had to ask a few people not to use Markdown and I just assumed it was a Github thing.

Oh cool. Let's force a dev to take like 5 minutes to write a commit message. That will make all of us more productive..

If this is a joke, eh it's not a great one.

If it's actually for real, might I suggest making a script for the emoji selection and the formatting of "Only One Newline"?

I really like the emoji approach. I think the dev job got a bit nicer since basically every dev tool from shell to editor can display them.

But :checkered_flag: for Windows? I think this is problematic. To me it looks more like an icon that suggests "finishing" something.

That's the problem with icons, their meaning breaks down rather fast if you can't create specific ones.

At the bottom it refers to 'a nifty CLI tool to aid in standardizing commit messages based on this document'

https://github.com/jakeasmith/commit

Oh, please don't...

I've seen CI systems broken because of Unicode in git commit lines... :-/

I'm not a huge fan of mandatory emoji in commit messages either, but this is a poor excuse. A Git commit message can contain any sequence of bytes except for a NUL byte. It can even contain invalid UTF-8. Tooling that doesn't treat commit messages like this is dangerously fragile. God forbid anyone accidentally pastes “typographer’s quotes” or text with diacritics into a commit message and breaks the build.

On the plus side, I don't think this style guide will break your CI. It seems to be taking advantage of GitHub's text => emoji substitution, so other Git tools will just see the text form (eg. :sparkles:)

Using emojis in elastic beanstalk and deploying the commit causes failure. So there are definitely problems with using emojis

Ah, but is that a problem with the commit messages, or with the CI systems?

this guide doesn't use any fancy-unicodes... I'm guessing that :penguin: isn't a unicode-penguin character, but some emoji supported natively by github

(e.g. :+1: means thumbs-up, but that's native to github / shows as :+1: to non-emoji-supported cli/browser/etc.)

Emoji might actually be usefull for quick oversight, but how can you include a reference to an issue for every commit? What if you are just adding more tests?

I've seen this kind of thing work really well for some teams. In that case there should be a "ref" for adding tests.

It tends to act as resource management, you shouldn't be working on things that your manager doesn't know about at least enough to make an "issue" for it.

But it's not a 100% must in all cases, just that there SHOULD be a ref there. The rule of thumb for us was if it's going to take more than 15 minutes, it needs an issue.

Edit:

I can't seem to reply any more, but this is just for organization. you can create your own issue and work on it on your own, this is just a way to organize and categorize the commits and provide an easy "parsable" way to give some context to them.

> The rule of thumb for us was if it's going to take more than 15 minutes, it needs an issue.

Gross. That sounds like process for process' sake. Or you could, you know, just trust that your developers are working on actually useful things because that's what you hired them to do, and we're all professionals here, one hopes.

Maybe something like this is useful for _very_ junior developers who need a bit of hand-holding before they're steeped in how professional development in a team setting works, but if you still need this sort of thing after even a year at work, that'd be a huge red flag to me.

That's way too many emojis for the purpose of quickly conveying high level information.

:checkered_flag: :globe_with_meridians: My subjec

Using emojis and limiting yourself to 50 chars is really difficult

Edit: Just seen that "Every Raw Emoji Text(:emoji:) is Counted as One Char!" - Great! But I'm not sure how Git CLI will like that.

someone tell me this is a joke?

:emoji1: :emoji2: This doesn't seem like joke.

Though it probably should.

Ref 14585129

Hard to tell.. I live by rules 8/9/10 [1] and some others to a lesser extent, but the emojis (which don't even come close to verbs describing what happens) make it quite funny.

[1] 8. Use the Present Tense ("Add feature" not "Added feature"). 9. Use the Imperative Mood ("Move cursor to..." not "Moves cursor to..."). 10. Use the Message body to explain what and why vs. how.

Had the same thought. Not sure if it is funny enough for a clear joke.

https://github.com/slashsBin/phabulous seems to be using the standard... The emojis look helpful.

I support the idea of investing small time into writing better commit messages to save much more on reading and comprehending them.

And why not emojis? They just won't be rendered where they aren't supported.

  :globe_with_meridians:

"slashbin" = [the username of this Github user]

"*" = [the projects or repos to which this styleguide applies is not defined > /dev/null]

  :pencil:

"Use the Present Tense" == "'Use the Present Tense' is missing object. Please specify: 'Use present tense verb'"

"Rule 8 parenthetical example ()" == "Use present participle as descriptor; try 'Adding feature' NOT 'Add feature' to accurately describe what submitter does during ``git commit``"

"Use the Imperative Mood" == "Error: Imperative Mood does not map to correct structure; please check grammar and re-submit"

Not sure if serious.

How funny is it that this commit's message (https://github.com/slashsBin/styleguide-git-commit-message/c...) in a repo about commit guidelines doesn't actually abide the ruleset (violated Rule 8).

Also rule 2

Ah, an ad for the next Markdown-APL.

But why?

Just flag it and move on.

Is this satire?

Lol, what. At least these kids are at home on their computers instead of out doing drugs.

I'd rather they used drugs instead of emoji

Reply on news.ycombinator.com