[rabidrat]

This is the start of a Strunk&White-level style guide. There are reasons for things beyond what the OP goes into; for example, the imperative form in English is also the infinitive, which is the most basic form of the word and the one that someone ESL would know or could easily recognize and look up ("caught exception" vs "catch exception"). This is consistent with wording your bug report titles the same way.

I played around with several different tenses and styles for awhile and eventually came to nearly the same conclusions as the OP. If another style has genuine merit, then by all means, do what feels right. But if you've never given it a thought, just do these basic things. Use `git add -p` (to make atomic commits) and spend a few seconds crafting each your commit messages to conform to this standard style. In the long run having a standard style guide actually makes things easier for you as a committer.

[lugg]

Agreed, I think too many people assume their code will live in their small team forever and ever. When you have a few thousand people committing daily it's a different story you need to keep consistency high and the jumping between past and present tense is gnarly.

Also the capitalising your sentence isn't a stupid nitpick. Broken window theory is real and if you're too lazy to capitalise your sentences in published work I'd hate to read your emails.