[pacaro]

Guilty as charged. Or maybe 'nolo contendere'. I just dropped 5kloc, 6 weeks work, into a repo with the message "Initial commit"

I'm currently working on the changes that will actually document what is otherwise a walk of code.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

[amyjess]

I can one-up you there: one of my "initial commit" messages was a dedication to my cat, who passed away a couple of days before I checked the code in. Better yet, we released that project as open-source, so that commit message is still floating around Assembla for all to see.

[tomswartz07]

I could see that. Initial imports and all that.

However, my example was a project that was around for about 3 years at that point, and it was basically just labelled: "Upgrade to version 2.0".

Face → Palm

[derefr]

I've made that commit before. It was actually an initial import of a from-scratch rewrite that happened to have utility libraries and such in common. Delete everything, drop in the new files you've been working on elsewhere, make that a commit. Not everything changes, because some things are the same by coincidence. Otherwise, it's just a discontinuity.

[rwallace]

Eh, uninformative commit messages aren't a sin, they're a trade-off. Right now, most of my commit messages are one word. Why? Because at the moment nobody cares about my commit messages because nobody cares about my project because it doesn't yet do anything useful. Getting to the point where it does something useful has higher priority than writing long messages nobody will read. Once the commit messages have an audience, then I'll put work into writing better ones.

[hinkley]

It's a self fulfilling prophecy though. If you want to be important you have to act important.

Yes, nobody cares about your commit messages until there's a bug or a major refactor. By then, if the commit messages suck, it's too late to do anything about it.

"Programs are meant to be read by humans and only incidentally for computers to execute"

Is never more true than when you're trying to fix bugs or make improvements. A project you can't improve is a dead project.