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I thought git commit messages were supposed to be present tense. "Fix the JS typo on foo page for Chrome."
by tenken 10y ago
I thought git commit messages were supposed to be present tense. "Fix the JS typo on foo page for Chrome."
- falcolas 10y agoWell, especially if you take the source article to heart, "Fix" is actually future tense - "When applied this commit will fix the JS typo on foo page for Chrome". "Fixes" would indicate the present tense: "This commit fixes the JS typo [...]"
- pklausler 10y agoI read it as using the imperative mood, myself; otherwise the sentence is missing its subject.
- falcolas 10y agoI've seen that reasoning as well, but who is doing the telling, and to whom? Ain't English fun?
- pklausler 10y agoIf the sentence still makes sense when ", dammit!" is appended to it, it's in the imperative mood and you are the subject.
- falcolas 10y agoFair enough, but how does a command apply to a git commit? If it's telling the git commit what to do, that doesn't make sense, since the commit comment is supposed to be about the commit, not a command to the commit. If it's telling me what to do, that doesn't make any sense either, since the work's already been done; the results of doing that work is the commit. I guess it could be considered to be an abstraction of what request initiated the change, but what value does that provide when going back through git logs (when compared to a past or present verb tense that describes the changes)?