I think it would be nice to somehow force comments to be attached to certain lines of code and if you change said lines of code you're asked to revise, keep or remove the accompanying comments.
This clearly attaches them to a specific revision of the code, which is also automatically superseded when some other change overwrites that line.
It's not far off to have a code editor plugin that shows this information visually beside the file. Kind of like the visual "git blame" in IntelliJ IDEs, but for the commit message.
I must be misunderstanding.
https://github.com/Axosoft/vscode-gitlens#current-line-blame...
It's a bit of a hassle but any out-of-band information is by definition a nonzero hassle to find unless a tool does it for you.
Also, "potentially relevant commits" are just all commits that change that line or lines. Following this principle, there is no justification to make a change where you can't document why it is so.
So the comments in the commit messages are an explanation / justification of changes, and they don’t replace code comments?
That just seems like “how you’re supposed to do it” and wouldn’t address code comments not being revised when necessary.