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Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

Tim Pope's article on commit messages is the gold standard. http://tbaggery.com/2008/04/19/a-note-about-git-commit-messa...

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Naive question: The present tense/imperative form is a standard i kind-of adopted without ever questioning.

Why is better to write in that form?

Just a guess, but I think it's because the message should indicate what the commit itself does, not what _you_ did to write it. For example, by merging this commit, the result is that I "Add X widget" to my code.

This is exactly how I describe this idea to people. I tell them to complete the following sentence. "Applying this change set will...". I've recently become less averse to verbs like fixes, updates adds, etc as I feel the sentence "The change set..." is still pretty good. The key, obviously, being you're describing the change set, not your actions.

I think of cherry picking commits as a good scenario where this wording makes sense: "I want to... fix A, then add feature B, then change x"

It's to keep in form with some automatic git messages (like merge) that output in that tense. Also that is the tense the Git project committers use themselves.

See: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3580013/should-i-use-past...

Also the past repeats: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2079612

For a good laugh: http://whatthecommit.com/

Well, for one, 2-3 characters shorter ('fix' vs 'fixes', 'fixed', or 'fixing')

So far these responses don't convince me there is any advantage.

It makes more sense to me that the trouble ticket ticket should be written in the imperative and the commit message should be past tense.

If you are going back in time in your commits and let's say you want to go forward. It just flows better to see it as a command when going in to the future.

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