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Comment by JelteF | Hacker News Reader

The most effective way I've found to get other people to "write" good commit messages is by changing the "Default commit message" for squash merges on the GitHub repo to "Pull request title and description". [1]

That fixes the "Squashing, when you have 100 crap commits, and then not re-editing the message is a crime" item, because suddenly not re-editing will give you a fairly useful message. This ofcourse assumes the PR description is useful, but I've found it much easier to convince people to write a decent PR description than to write decent commit messages.

[1]: https://github.blog/changelog/2022-08-23-new-options-for-con...

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I love giving examples and context in a PR description. Squash-merged PRs can become cumbersome snowballs, but the final commit message should elaborate in proportion.

I also like to include before and after tables, either with stats (eg. perf) or with screenshot with UI changes.

First I head about automatic squash messages, and if they include the whole title and description I should look into it a bit more!

This is what we have resorted to in my team. It was just too difficult to get everyone to keep good commit hygiene and follow a best practice like conventional commits.

Having been through the pain of getting teams to adopt conventional commits a few times, I found that integrating a wizard like commitizen helped folks who were annoyed by commit linting learn and get comfortable with the rules and format so there was less friction when their commit was rejected by the linter.

It also really helps if you can wire up some continuous deployment to automate something tedious like properly incrementing the version number in the semantic version, updating the changelog, and deploy out a new `latest` or `next` tag to the package registry.

Even the most reticent users are often inspired to follow conventional commits once they see the possibilities that open up.

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