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I was half onboard with his reasoning to remove the commit messages. But then I realized, they're only useless if they're bad commit messages. Especially if you

I was half onboard with his reasoning to remove the commit messages. But then I realized, they're only useless if they're bad commit messages. Especially if you're using PRs and using "squash + merge" for all your changes (which should really be the default IMO) the commit messages will be the PR titles and PR number and that's pretty useful. And then the commit time for the file is obviously super important. What else might be really cool is some kind of indicator of how often the file changes, in addition to the most recent change. Like sometimes if you see a file, maybe it was changed 2 days ago but only because someone renamed a method and that made a one-line change in 50 files. But before that, when was it changed? Does it usually change multiple times a week, or was this the only time it changed in the past month? Even if it was just a rough color gradient or something it would be pretty cool to see at a glance which are the most active directories and files in your repo.

userbinator 8y ago
And then the commit time for the file is obviously super important. What's nice about git is that you also get this propagating to the directories all the way up to the root, so you can quite easily see which areas of the code have been changed recently too. This isn't something normal filesystems have (for performance reasons more than anything --- I imagine if one tried to use git as a filesystem such that each file change was an actual git commit, the root directory node would be hammered with constant updates and an enormous bottleneck) but in the context of a VCS it's amazingly useful.
- JoshTriplett 8y ago
  > What's nice about git is that you also get this propagating to the directories all the way up to the root, so you can quite easily see which areas of the code have been changed recently too. Exactly! It's easy to see at a glance, for instance, that the code changed recently but the documentation hasn't been updated in a long time. Or that the LICENSE file just got updated a few days ago. Or that a new top-level module got introduced.
JoshTriplett 8y ago
> Especially if you're using PRs and using "squash + merge" for all your changes (which should really be the default IMO) I tend to use either "rebase" or "merge" for everything, and I expect people submitting PRs to make good commits. > What else might be really cool is some kind of indicator of how often the file changes That's a good idea! How about a sparkline-sized indicator of change activity over time? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparkline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparkline

userbinator 8y ago

And then the commit time for the file is obviously super important. What's nice about git is that you also get this propagating to the directories all the way up to the root, so you can quite easily see which areas of the code have been changed recently too. This isn't something normal filesystems have (for performance reasons more than anything --- I imagine if one tried to use git as a filesystem such that each file change was an actual git commit, the root directory node would be hammered with constant updates and an enormous bottleneck) but in the context of a VCS it's amazingly useful.

JoshTriplett 8y ago
> What's nice about git is that you also get this propagating to the directories all the way up to the root, so you can quite easily see which areas of the code have been changed recently too. Exactly! It's easy to see at a glance, for instance, that the code changed recently but the documentation hasn't been updated in a long time. Or that the LICENSE file just got updated a few days ago. Or that a new top-level module got introduced.

JoshTriplett 8y ago

> Especially if you're using PRs and using "squash + merge" for all your changes (which should really be the default IMO) I tend to use either "rebase" or "merge" for everything, and I expect people submitting PRs to make good commits. > What else might be really cool is some kind of indicator of how often the file changes That's a good idea! How about a sparkline-sized indicator of change activity over time? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparkline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparkline