Commit messages

[Thomas Koch <th...@koch.ro>]

Hi,

just an idea/observation: In the last weeks I often needed to find the 
reasoning for a particular section of code. So I used git log[1] to see which 
commit introduced the section and from there found the jira issue discussing 
the change.
Now take ZOOKEEPER-335 for example with two sub-tasks all in one commit. 
That's a lot of comments to read in jira to understand a commit.

So the thought is, that the commit message of a change should be an essential 
part of a change and be reviewed just like the patch itself.[2] The commit 
message should sum up the discussion and reasoning of the change so that 
you're still fine even if you'd lose the issue tracker.[3]

[1] You don't imagine what you're missing, if you're still on SVN!
[2] Now I realize that gerrit includes the commit message in the review and 
how useful this actually is!
[3] It would be best of course, if the code would be understandable without 
ressort to the VCS log and issue tracker.

Best regards,

Thomas Koch, http://www.koch.ro