Yes, we are on our third ticketing system on our team with dead refs to old issues. PR without a commit documenting why you need a change does not normally get approved and helps a lot also at present and future review time. Lots of value for new devs to see how thinking went and why something exist and not something else etc.
Documenting it also forces people to think why they are adding a change in the first place. Code added without purpose becomes dead weight and tech debt.
You'll at least need the discipline to include the ticket ID in the message. Links to documentation are ok, but they will likely rot and even if they don't the content may change such that it no longer accurately reflects the commit changes.
Look, I'll make this easy to understand. The parent comment that this stems from said:
> It can't convey what decisions were made, what alternatives were discarded, what business motivations may have led to that code.
If you're advocating this should all go in commit messages then I don't know what to say that I haven't already, it objectively doesn't belong there. The end.
I think we’re advocating for is that it contains a sufficient amount of context. Ideally it’s like “XYZ-123: Enable multi-foo support for Bar”
Links to ticket IDs are good, and good leaders don’t let old ticket links break on bugtracker migration.
A sentence or so to let future devs know what this change meant to do or at least what initiative it was intended to support, is also good. If future devs (even future YOU) don’t know what you were trying to do, they might revert a change which, without context, looks like a mistake.
Doing both ticket link + text is ideal because someone might screw up the ticket system, and a sentence on its own can be ambiguous.
Doing neither, on purpose, is just willful stupidity. Don’t even bother with Git if you want your commits, the ones that end up in “dev” I mean, to all just say “wip,” “asdf,” and “hope it works now.”
Sure but code can't capture everything. Maybe with enough comments I guess, but not code alone. For example, code won't tell you that this feature was timeboxed hence this edgecase was not supported