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Comment by zerocount | Hacker News Reader

Yep. I make a commit on every little change and every team I've been on makes me squash them on merge.

Comments in Git commits are bad. Just comment the code and make sure the comments are updated while you're in the code. You can also look at them in a code review. The argument that they get outdated is easily remedied, but people just want to keep claiming they write 'self documented code.'

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Git commit messages and code comments serve very different purposes, I don't see any reason to try to use one for the other or opposite.

To me both are important but for different reasons. I don't want to search the blame history of a line of code if a simple comment had been enough, neither would I want to primarily use code comments when bisecting.

> make sure the comments are updated while you're in the code. You can also look at them in a code review.

People will invariably forget to update comments and unless the comments show up in context lines of the diff associated with a change, it's likely that reviewers will overlook the need to change them.

You comment is a standard explanation for not having comments. Always makes me wonder why stale comments aren't flagged during code review? Seriously failure to update comments should eventually lead to constructive dismissal.

I don't think "constructive dismissal" is the phrase is you want there. (That's normally associated with employer wrongdoing or, at a minimum, mischaracterizing the terms of an employee's departure..)

I don’t understand. Can you not squash your commits and rewrite the message before you merge? Wouldn’t that preserve the message? (Trying to think of a scenario where it wouldn’t…)

I dunno if he really meant that, or just said he is explaining the added functionality in detail. I do explain in the commit message the feature I have just added.

Everyone has to be onboard for that to work. Lots of people just never look at comments because they don't trust them.

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