> This is one of those interesting bits where things feel more like personality types as opposed to ways to create maintainable software. I have yet to see a project fail because commit messages were or were not in imperative form or if the first letter was capitalized.
I think this is the same thing as using a linter and code formatter to enforce a certain coding convention for a given code base. I personally find projects that are written in inconsistent ways harder to reason about and harder to maintain because you have to keep track of multiple ways of doing various things rather than using a standard way of doing those same things.
With commit messages, having a consistent style makes them faster to read and easier to parse (whether manually or through tooling).
> Commits implementing a brand new feature and involving a ton of changes, probably don't need a whole lot more than what the feature is and what is the expected behavior
Describing the motivation behind adding a particular feature and it's possible advantages and disadvantages could be useful. It takes a lot less time to type that up than to figure it out by asking a bunch of other people or reading through disparate sources of incomplete documentation.
I think this is the same thing as using a linter and code formatter to enforce a certain coding convention for a given code base. I personally find projects that are written in inconsistent ways harder to reason about and harder to maintain because you have to keep track of multiple ways of doing various things rather than using a standard way of doing those same things.
With commit messages, having a consistent style makes them faster to read and easier to parse (whether manually or through tooling).
> Commits implementing a brand new feature and involving a ton of changes, probably don't need a whole lot more than what the feature is and what is the expected behavior
Describing the motivation behind adding a particular feature and it's possible advantages and disadvantages could be useful. It takes a lot less time to type that up than to figure it out by asking a bunch of other people or reading through disparate sources of incomplete documentation.