Re: Make commit messages optional

On 2022-04-08 at 03:35:04, jurgen_gjoncari@icloud.com wrote:

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 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.