How to Write a Git Commit Message
The biggest problem with commit messages: They lie.<p>The main reason for this is that most people tend put more than one atomic change into a single commit, but in the message they often only mention the "main change" which they introduced with the commit. This in turn makes it much harder to find out which commit introduced a given problem into the code base since people will usually read the (incomplete) message of a given commit and think "the problem can't be here because this commit only did X" while it actually did Y & Z as well. So, personally, I think we could as well abandon writing commit messages entirely and instead make sure that individual changes are small enough so that we can figure out what happened by looking at the actual code instead.<p>As an example, if you look at individual commits in the Django project (such as this one: <a href="https://github.com/django/django/commit/e7e8d30cae9457339eb49ae8584e82ff0a038e99" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/django/django/commit/e7e8d30cae9457339eb4...</a>), it is often much easier to figure out what happened by looking at the file diff than the commit message.<p>A tool that could summarize changes in source code using advanced (semantic) diffing instead of line-by-line diffs would make this much easier of course.