[idlephysicist]

I totally agree, I have seen people get so fixated on this in addition to:

- review feedback format

- variable naming

- keeping line lengths to 80 lines

- log message formats (sweet jesus the amount of time wasted debating that alone)

Whenever I see these conventions about commit formatting they generally seem to focus on the first line (notable exceptions being Git and the Linux kernel among others I assume), one line is rarely enough to describe the change – I’m not advocating for writing an essay for a 5 line change though in some cases it might be warranted.

Professionally I rarely see useful commit messages, by useful I mean something that could be read by someone without context and get a general understanding of why a change was made. Frequently I have seen “updates” / “wip” etc. in the master branch. More frequently I see that the quality of commit message decreases with an engineer’s seniority – though like every thing there are exceptions.