In the beginning I had similar thoughts and my own problems with the
present tense. But after a while I see that it depends on the point of
view. Currently you are writing the commit message from your own point of
view, but if you look at the changes from the commit itself, then it makes
sense that the commit describes what is *does*.

Markus

On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 12:40 PM, Tim Buschtöns
<[email protected]>wrote:

> Hi.
>
> Agree with the summary-body format
> Disagree with the present tense.  It feels very unnatural.
> For generated message like a merge this still might make some sense, as
> the commit and merge are really the same thing, i.e. happen at the same
> time. But when i commit something, i summarize what i DID, not what i'm
> doing or tell someone to do. Even when you later read the history it feels
> wrong. Ever read a book written like that? I had to, its very confusing.
>
> Greetings to all
>
> Am 29.06.2012 11:39, schrieb Ralf Sternberg:
>
>  Hi all,
>>
>> I'd like to propose that we agree on a common practise for commit
>> messages. With git we will never lose any piece of history anymore,
>> and EGit's blame support makes it easy to track down any line of code
>> to the commit that has changed it.
>>
>> A short explanation in a commit helps understanding the changes later
>> on, and I also think it's a very good practice when you have worked on
>> a fix for an hour or more, to take a short moment thinking,
>> summarizing or explaining what you've done and why, before the change
>> goes into the project's history. Moreover, good commit messages show
>> that we care for our code base and not just dump stuff into the
>> repository.
>>
>> The git commit message format explained in [1] seems to be the
>> commonly accepted best practice and my suggestion is to adopt this and
>> add it to our git guide [2]. I quoted the essence below, but check the
>> article for the  reasons. Another good read is the Linux kernel doc
>> for submitting patches [3]. And there's an Eclipse Bug about commit
>> messages [4].
>>
>> --------
>> Capitalized, short (50 chars or less) summary
>>
>> More detailed explanatory text, if necessary.  Wrap it to about 72
>> characters or so.  In some contexts, the first line is treated as the
>> subject of an email and the rest of the text as the body.  The blank
>> line separating the summary from the body is critical (unless you omit
>> the body entirely); tools like rebase can get confused if you run the
>> two together.
>>
>> Write your commit message in the present tense: "Fix bug" and not "Fixed
>> bug."  This convention matches up with commit messages generated by
>> commands like git merge and git revert.
>>
>> Further paragraphs come after blank lines.
>>
>> - Bullet points are okay, too
>>
>> - Typically a hyphen or asterisk is used for the bullet, preceded by a
>>   single space, with blank lines in between, but conventions vary here
>>
>> - Use a hanging indent
>> --------
>>
>> Thoughts? Comments?
>>
>> Regards, Ralf
>>
>>
>> [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-messages.html>
>> [2] http://wiki.eclipse.org/RAP/**Git <http://wiki.eclipse.org/RAP/Git>
>> [3] http://www.kernel.org/pub/**software/scm/git/docs/v1.7.6.**
>> 5/SubmittingPatches<http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/v1.7.6.5/SubmittingPatches>
>> [4] 
>> https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/**show_bug.cgi?id=380550<https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=380550>
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>
>
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