I do, and I also work on legacy systems. It just never occurs to me that commit history would somehow help me instead of just looking at the current state of the code.
I would say however that the commit messages mostly are just squashed pull requests with ticket names and single sentence so I'd agree that they wouldn't be very good for that purpose, but I don't see anyone at the org complaining about this.
It's mostly on the Internet I read how others use the git history, but I haven't seen anyone really doing a lot of that in real life.
> I would say however that the commit messages mostly are just squashed pull requests with ticket names and single sentence so I'd agree that they wouldn't be very good for that purpose, but I don't see anyone at the org complaining about this.
For me it's usually blame, look for a line that hasn't been touched by some triviality, then from that commit message either to a ticket reference, or, if absent or unavailable, to history shortly before and after. So yes, I do look at old history. In a codebase that has seen a lot of squash rewriting that won't be of much help of course.
I would say however that the commit messages mostly are just squashed pull requests with ticket names and single sentence so I'd agree that they wouldn't be very good for that purpose, but I don't see anyone at the org complaining about this.
It's mostly on the Internet I read how others use the git history, but I haven't seen anyone really doing a lot of that in real life.