[dmurray]

Surely the most important part of a commit is the code committed, not the accompanying message.

[iainmerrick]

Yes and no. Both are important.

The code is what actually gets run, sure, but good code with bad or misleading documentation can cause trouble later on. Commit messages are documentation.

[cyphar]

And commit messages are possibly the best form of documentation when it comes to debugging a problem -- it lets you know exactly what a developer was thinking when the code was written.