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Comment by dolmen | Hacker News Reader

Most commit messages are just "update" :(

https://github.com/w-okada/voice-changer/commits/master

IMO, in small/solo development projects, you really don't need particularly descriptive git messages.

I'll frequently commit 40 disparate changes under "stuff" in my personal projects. It's never been a problem. No real need to LARP a big software project with many developers.

Until you come back to it and forget what you were doing

You can always just read the code. I'm not really sure what git commit messages would contribute other than misinformation at that point.

Code tells you what it does.

The commit message tells you what you meant it to do. When fixing problems in complex systems this can be vital.

To be fair, function names also tells you what the code is intended to do.

Git based workflows were not the missing technology that finally unlocked the development of complex systems. We wrote complex code before we had git annotate, even before version control systems were widely adopted.

It was considered good practise to write meaningful commit comments from the very first version control systems, long before git was invented.

Source: I have had commits rejected on code review for insufficiently descriptive commit messages in RCS, SCCS, Visual SourceSafe and CVS and probably others before git was first invented.

In your solo projects (which is the context for this discussion), who is doing these code reviews?

What is a sane practice varies immensely with the scale and scope of the project. Many things that are nearly mandatory for large scale development are pointless obstacles in small scale development.

Reviewing recent diffs has always been far more helpful for me.

Hard disagree. "The smallest group of programmers is you, and yourself a week later."

Not really been a problem I've run into. I've been working like this (with git) for a good decade, and longer than that with SVN and CVS.

If anything, I think that's more symptomatic of poorly structured work and questionable planning.

Having good commit messages is symptomatic of poorly structured work and poor planning? That's a weird take, to be honest.

If your productivity completely falls apart without good commit messages (or any particular tool, say git), that is symptomatic of poorly structured work and poor planning.

I don't think anyone has made the argument that commit messages are the sole aspect of good project management.

I mean git doubles as cloud for me to hop between machines and keep working on a project... So I literally just "." most of the time lol

I personally prefer to use '.' to avoid the no commit message warning

Oh man. That's not just me? Haha nice.

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