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Message body just as in <subject> use imperative, present tense: “change” not “changed” nor “changes” Is it me or is this directly contradicted by the exampl

by hmpc 12y ago

Message body just as in <subject> use imperative, present tense: “change” not “changed” nor “changes” Is it me or is this directly contradicted by the examples at the end? Which, by the way, seem much more natural than they would be if they obeyed this convention.

laughinghan 12y ago
Yeah, they miss this in several examples ("updated", "added", "fixed"). I know where you're coming from, it feels more natural because when you ask yourself "what did this change do?" to write the commit message, the answer is in past tense. They fail to mention the reasoning behind the convention, which dates back at least to tpope's 2008 blog post[1] and is also in Documentation/SubmittingPatches in Git's own repo[2], which is that not only does the imperative tense tend to be slightly more concise, but more importantly, it's consistent with automatic commit messages generated by commands like git merge and git revert. [1]: http://tbaggery.com/2008/04/19/a-note-about-git-commit-messages.html http://tbaggery.com/2008/04/19/a-note-about-git-commit-messa... [2]: https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Documentation/SubmittingPatches https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Documentation/Submitt...