Question

With Git, if you are committing, it includes a section under the commit message that is commented out. This contains instructions on writing a commit message as well as a list of files that are changing. Like this:

# Please enter the commit message for your changes. Lines starting
# with '#' will be ignored, and an empty message aborts the commit.
# On branch master
# Changes to be committed:
#   (use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage)
#
#       modified:  important-file.txt 
#
# Changed but not updated:
#   (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
#   (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
#
#       modified:   some-other-thing.txt
#
# Untracked files:
#   (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
#
#       untracked.txt

Is it possible to add further material to this file? One clear use case is for those using issue tracking software like Trac, Redmine and the like is specifying extra syntactical elements. Redmine users, for instance, can include the issue number and some special keywords to mark issues as resolved: the keywords are “refs” (and “references”) and “fixes” (or “closes”) – but I often find it difficult to remember the keywords.

It would be handy, then, if one could append some project-specific text at the bottom of the commit instructions.

Is there any existing way of doing this or do I need to hack one in? As a side issue, do any other VCSes (like Mercurial) have similar behaviour?

Answer 1

I used a commit.template (as described here). I could have used a prepare-commit-msg hook, but a commit template does the job slightly easier, plus I can keep the commit template in the version control for the project.