[the_reformation]

It's invaluable when reverting other's changes during an on-call emergency. Atomic commits that encapsulate one feature vs. trying to piece together five commits that are named "trying out singleton approach", "adding tests", "figured out corner case" is a world of difference during a rollback. I don't even have to really understand the commit message, so long as you squash them.

Also, pointing to a JIRA issue, etc. if your company uses that is a nice way to complete the loop, the one link that explicitly ties code to planning.

[graton]

I think having commit messages that point to a an issue tracker and don't have the context from that issue tracker are a bad idea.

At some point things are likely to change and the issue tracker that was being used will be changed. And now all those commit messages are useless because the underlying issue tracker is gone.

I'm not saying don't put a link to the issue tracker, but please make the commit message self-sufficient.