+1 from me too. I previously thought about my own messages as well, and wondered "am I supposed to edit the generated message or keep it as is"? Most of the time I focus on writing good commits with valuable messages. Especially for larger changes a commit-based review with good comments is better in my opinion. But at the same time, some intermediate steps can be removed from the final commit.
On Sat, 20 Dec 2025, 21:38 David Smiley, <[email protected]> wrote: > I really care/believe in the value of thoughtful commit messages to > communicate what a change is all about. But many times I increasingly see > here (and wherever GHE is used, in my experience), a lack of care. A > committer is excited to see a PR merged and they just hit the big green > button on GitHub to squash merge without thinking the slightest bit about > the commit message (apparently!), despite resulting in lots of junk in > there (e.g. "tidy"). Perhaps it annoys me more than it should... but boy > does it ever. In a word, it's "sloppy". Moreover, it's a lost opportunity > to say something of value to a future reader, rather than a series of > rather draft-y notes that reflects the iteration process, not the final > product of what was actually merged in the end. > > Next week, I plan to ask ASF Infra to configure our project to change our > configuration so that the squash commit message default will be only the PR > title. This will be less convenient for me and those of you who use the > existing intermediate commit messages as a draft to compose something > good. We'll deal with it; we'll get by. But hopefully looking at a big > *blank* text box by that squash merge button will prompt a... "oh yeah, > gotta write something there" to go do that. If we find this change to be a > net negative, we can change back. > > note: I checked if .asf.yaml has an option for this -- it doesn't. So I'll > file an INFRA ticket referencing GHE docs: > > https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/configuring-branches-and-merges-in-your-repository/configuring-pull-request-merges/configuring-commit-squashing-for-pull-requests > > ~ David Smiley > Apache Lucene/Solr Search Developer > http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidwsmiley >
