I’ve read all kinds of Git tutorials, including the official one, and they all seem to tell me it’s good convention and practice to write Git commit notes in the present tense.
Why is that? What is the reasoning behind it?
Share
Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
I’ve read all kinds of Git tutorials, including the official one, and they all seem to tell me it’s good convention and practice to write Git commit notes in the present tense.
Why is that? What is the reasoning behind it?
Git is a distributed VCS (version control system). Multiple people can work on the same projects. It’ll get changes from many sources.
Rather than writing messages that say what a committer has done. It’s better to consider these messages as the instructions for what is going to be done after the commit is applied on the repo.
So write a message like this
Instead of
Treat the git log not a history of your actions, but a sequence descriptions of what all the commits do.
There is a big thread on hacker news about it. There you’ll get many more reasons behind this convention.