Git Commit Message

[matt@lemdro.id]

This is where I thought it was going as well.

[zerofk@lemmy.zip]

Shakespeare may have coined a lot of English words, but only Wallace can claim deez nuts.

[sukhmel@programming.dev]

And the blame has those commit messages. That is beside the fact that most authors may not even work there anymore

[quazaromega@lemy.lol]

I keep putting that off, but maybe I should really dive into that.
Thanks for telling me about the TUI btw, I didn't know we had that too now!

[greenknight23@lemmy.world]

I don't even waste my time anymore frankly. people just do a git add . and git commit -m "did some stuff".

sorry, I've just worked with a lot of shitbag devs that honestly think of git as a flat filesystem that can't even properly branch or merge.

personally, I still put in clear commits and even do patch level adds. from what I have experienced though, using AI to generate those commit messages based on actual changes would be a godsend compared to the fuckery I've had to deal with.

[monkdervierte@lemmy.zip]

Nope. That's a temporary solution.

[monkdervierte@lemmy.zip]

git commit -m "A spirit trapped within a tree, no mouth to scream or eyes to see. A cage of bark, a prison of wood. A thing of rage where nature stood."

[runeko@programming.dev]

"Small changes to a few sections." There. Happy?

[baines@lemmy.cafe]

“this is temporary test code that should be removed before delivery to the customer”

this is real

[bestboyfriendintheworld@sh.itjust.works]

Always put a ticket number in the commit message. That can make it much easier later to find out what the context was for some weird solution.

[ferk@programming.dev]

git commit -m "$(fortune | cowsay)"

[innerscientist@lemmy.world]

"Small changes to everything"
98 files changed, 7568 insertions(+), 1022 deletions(-)

[innerscientist@lemmy.world]

Go for broke
git commit -m "It works on my machine $(tar -ca . -C / | base64)"

[mtk@lemmy.world]

For complex changes go with "self-explanatory" just to fuck with peoples' confidence

[jjjalljs@ttrpg.network]

I've worked with a few people who are just incomprehensible. One refuses to write commit messages of any detail. Just "work in progress". Cast him into the pit.

There was another guy that refused to name his tests. His code was like

describe(''. () => {
  it('', () => {
     expect(someFunc()).toEqual(0);
  }
 it('', () => {
    expect(someFunc(1)).toEqual(0);
  }
 it('', () => {
   expect(someFunc("").toEqual(1);
 }
}

He was like, "Test names are like comments and they turn into lies! So I'm not going to do it."

I was like, a. what the fuck. b. do you also not name your files? projects? children?

He was working at a very big company last I heard.

edit: If you're unfamiliar, the convention is to put a human readable description where those empty strings are. This is used in the test output. If one fails, it'll typically tell include the name in the output.

[hakunawazo@lemmy.world]

git commit -m "Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime so I comment meaningful on company time"

[sukhmel@programming.dev]

To this I completely agree, a lot of people don't want to use the tools for the benefit of the future colleagues or even self

[merc@sh.itjust.works]

Also, what were you hoping to accomplish? At a minimum, are you fixing a bug? Adding a feature? Cleaning up ugly code? Trying to improve performance? Adding comments to something that wasn't obvious?

Did you change an interface that other people use in a way that might break something? Even if it's fixing a bug, is that a bug that other people might have been relying on?

I think the most problematic changes are the little fixes, because often the CL goes from something that looks like it should work, to something else that also looks like it should work. It's very helpful when the commit message describes how it was broken. Otherwise, if you have to roll back the changes you don't know what might get broken again.

[merc@sh.itjust.works]

See also semantic commit messages where you tag every commit with the type of commit: feature, fix, docs, refactor, test, etc.

My only beef with it is that they chose "feat" as a way to shorten the word "feature" when "feat" is already a word that means something different. Not every feature is a feat, and a lot of the biggest feats are actually bug fixes.

[merc@sh.itjust.works]

I get the hesitation that things can turn into lies, but that's a sign that you're doing things wrong. That also tends to happen to comments that are far away from the relevant code, like the documentation of a 100 line function. The function can change while the comment is no longer visible on the screen, so it's easy to forget to also fix the comment.

But test strings like that are designed to avoid that problem. They're right there next to your tests for a reason. You should always be right next to them when you're changing the test.

Fundamentally, this is something that has to be addressed with code reviews. If someone can commit their changes to a group repository without anybody else seeing them, you're going to get stuff like this. As soon as you get decent code reviews, you can just reject a change where there are tests without documentation, the same way you can reject a change to a test where the documentation is now out of date.