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by jacknagel 5313 days ago
It's hard to understate the importance of this.

GitHub's online editor has a default commit message along the lines of "Edited path/to/file", and I see a lot of pull requests with that message, and nothing else. That's about the most useless message possible, since it adds no information that isn't already implicit in the commit. It would be better to leave it blank and force users to at least write _something_.
1 comments
tl 5313 days ago
Be careful, we do that by default and we get a lot of "commit", "commit", "commit $date", "merge commit" messages from some programmers. Either a programmer accepts that a meaningful message is important on commits, or they don't. It's a people problem not a technical one.
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tomjen3 5313 days ago
The problem with that is that at least when I am merging something I often (with Mercurial anyway) don't have anything useful to say -- the commit is even marked specially as a merge commit. Other than bringing in one branch (which has hopefully been correctly commented) no changes were made.

So really, what do you want them to say?

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arkitaip 5313 days ago
Ah, but what if we encouraged programmers to write better commit messages? What if we splashed on a bit of gamification to raise everyone's level of awareness? Maybe a badge on your profile page...?
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drivingmenuts 5313 days ago
How would you objectively determine the usefulness of a commit message, though? While it might contain all the necessary parts, there is no way to determine if the sum of the parts adds up to a useful whole.

Also, badges are done to death. Everyone's got badges these days - so much so they're like ads. Personally, I've developed a blind spot to most of them.

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arkitaip 5313 days ago
Objectivity is irrelevant and impossible in this context of raising awareness and fun. If the mechanism was something as simple as an upvote next to the commit message, you would let the community define usefulness of the commit message.
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andrewflnr 5313 days ago
Upvoting itself might be all you need.
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tomjen3 5313 days ago
Any you will determine that, programmatically, how exactly?

Besides, badges are for kids.

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