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Comment by richmarr | Hacker News Reader

Sadly. In my view they're bikeshedding, hard.

Bikeshedding like this is useful as a team efficiency metric.

If you can't get quickly to an agreement about such a thing, or if the members of the team that didn't get their way actively rebel (or worse sabotage), you are working with a team of divas.

(note: of course developers whinge, as long as you stick with the team decisions once their are made, whinge all you want)

> If you can't get quickly to an agreement about such a thing ... you are working with a team of divas.

Or you're working on such a trivial problem that it should have been given to an individual, not a team.

Well that's the point. Feed the team with a trivial problem to see how they react.

A well working team will probably do as you say - volunteer an individual to write the rule in an email and follow it from there on.

If you going to introduce changes in a team, like for example introducing Agile (the proper way) or you are starting a new project, you want to quickly gauge the team dynamic, and that's a good exercise.

I feel like if you work in a team of divas you don't need a test like this to tell you that.

It kinda reminds me of that buzzfeed article "53 Signs Your Boyfriend Is Really Three Children In A Trenchcoat".

For those who don't know what that means https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law_of_triviality

See also http://bikeshed.org/

(make sure to hit F5 a few times)

I am glad to see your comment. I wanted to post 'Who cares?' Not about commit messages, because having nice compact descriptive messages can be useful, but mostly about the 'dot' at the end. Because seriously; 'Who cares?'

What is it about our industry (or perhaps just the slice of it that hangs around HN) that makes people feel the need to spout absolutist dogma about trivial shit like whether a commit message should be a sentence or not? Jesus. Sometimes a sentence is the most useful and sometimes a very short newspaper-headline-style summary is the most useful. Why must we constantly go in search of hard rules that prevent this sort of consideration? If having to shift between styles makes commit logs too hard to read for you, maybe the commit messages aren't the problem.

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