Writing good commit messages

Acknowledgement: This document is based on erlang/otp's wiki page "Writing good commit messages". (Thanks folks!)

Good commit messages serve at least three important purposes:

• To speed up the reviewing process.
• To help us write a good release note.
• To help the future maintainers of yakut-project/yakut (it could be you!), say five years into the future, to find out why a particular change was made to the code or why a specific feature was added.

Structure your commit message like this:

#1 Summarize clearly in one line what the commit is about

Describe the problem the commit solves or the use
case for a new feature. Justify why you chose
the particular solution. (Optional)

DO

• Write the summary line and description in imperative mood. Write “fix”, “add”, “change” instead of “fixed”, “added”, “changed”.
• Write commit messages in sentence case, not title case (i.e. do not capitalize every word of the sentence).
• Mention relating issue number(s) if commit message is related to particular issue(s).
• If you're writing a multiple line commit message, always leave the second line blank.
• Line break the commit message (to make the commit message readable without having to scroll horizontally in gitk).

DON'T

• Don’t end the summary line with a period.
• Don't start commit messages with a lowercase letter.