by fragmede | 2025-10-03 19:05:05+00:00
One of the best things about git, and the reason it won, is that as a tool, it's extremely unopinionated on this matter, and is supportive of however you want to do it. Of course, one of the worst things about git is how unopinionated it is. If you want 300 commit messages in every branch with the commit message of "poop" and no squashing, and none of them even compile, the tool isn't going to stop you. If every commit is fully functional and rebased on top of master so the graph isn't an octopus, you can. If you'd rather use the name main as the primary branch, also totally fine. Git, the tool leaves all that up to the user and the culture they operate in.

Naturally, I have Opinions on the right way to use git, having used it since inception within various different contexts at various places, along with other VCSs. What works at one place won't be right for another place, and vice versa. Especially given different skill levels of individuals and of teams, the tools involved, and how much weight I have to review code and commits before it gets accepted. What's important is it should work for you, not the other way around. Regardless of where I'm working though, my local commit messages are total crap. "wip" being the most common, but I commit frequently. Importantly though, before I do eg a slightly involved refactor, going back to see what it was before I started is trivial. Being a skilled operator of git is important to make it easy to run newly written tests against the old code. Being efficient at rebase -i and sorting commits into understandable chunks and squashing minor commits to keep things clean is key.

I don't think every patch in a series has to work totally independently for every git repo, but what it comes down to is maintenance. There's nothing worse than digging around in git history, trying to figure out why things are how they are, only to dead end at a 3000 line commit from 5 years ago with the message "poop, lol". It's even worse when the person who did that was you!

Universally, what it comes down to is maintenance. That totally rushed prototype that was just for a demo has now been in production for years, and there's this weird bug with the new database. If you hate yourself, your job, future you, your colleagues, and everybody that comes after you, and you're no good at git, by all means, shit out 300 commits, don't squash, and have the PR message be totally useless. Also believe you're hot shit after one semester of boot camp and that no one else cares just because you want to go home, get high, and play xbox. (Not remotely saying that's you, but those people are out there.)

We could get all philosophical and try and answer the question of if there are any universal truths, nevermind universally best git commit practices.

I don't work where you work, don't know your team, or anybody's skill levels on it, so I'll just close with a couple thoughts. the tool is there to work for you, so learn to work with it not against it. Git bisect is your friend. And that it really sucks 4 years later to be confronted by totally useless commit messages on inappropriately sized commits (too big or too small) and have to guess at things in order to ship fixes to prod (on the prototype that was supposed to get thrown away but never did) and just hope and pray that you've guessed correctly.