RE: Make commit messages optional

>On 2022-04-08 at 03:35:04, jurgen_gjoncari@icloud.com wrote:
>> I think that often commit messages are unnecessary. I propose that by
>> default a user should be able to commit without a message.
>
>This topic comes up from time to time and you can see the previous discussion in
>the archives.  The reasons we haven't done this are roughly as follows.
>
>First, writing commit messages is a way of communicating to others about your
>changes, as well as to future you.  In my experience, it is substantially more
>important in software engineering to communicate clearly and effectively than it is
>to write code.  The computer will accept anything that runs, but when you write
>code others must read it and change it, and they must have the appropriate
>context behind those changes to evaluate your changes and to make their own in
>the future.
>We want to encourage good software engineering practices.
>
>Tools like git log use the commit message, and empty commit messages mean that
>viewing the list of commits is completely useless without viewing a diff.  This
>means that functionality such as `git log --graph` is just completely broken.  Writing
>even one line in the commit summary makes a massive difference in the usability
>of these tools.
>
>Users who want this behaviour can use --allow-empty-message or create an alias
>with that option.  The functionality already exists.  I use aliases extensively in my
>development and I know others do as well, so this shouldn't be an impediment if
>you're working on projects where this is acceptable.
>
>> I don't think this would be a problem from the UX point of view,
>> because a user could get a lot of information about a change, from the
>> history of the GitHub repository, such as from the time of change, and
>> seeing the diff.
>
>I certainly hope when you are writing code that you explain your changes
>somewhere.  I know some people who use pull requests prefer to do so in the pull
>request rather than the commit message, but I for one would never accept a
>change that doesn't contain some sort of explanation about why it's valuable or
>relevant somewhere.  I am, unfortunately, not omniscient, so I need people to
>communicate their intentions and decisions to me, and the best way to do that is
>with words.
>
>I should also point out that the GitHub UI is specifically designed to show the
>commit summary in the history view, so GitHub intends for you to write at least
>one line of helpful text (the summary) in this context.
>
>Overall, I don't believe your proposal is likely to gain traction here for the reasons I
>mentioned above, and I personally don't support it.