> I don't want your entire life story in my commit log. I agree with this, but I think yours is too short. Scientific papers typically introduce enough inform

> I don't want your entire life story in my commit log. I agree with this, but I think yours is too short. Scientific papers typically introduce enough information such that a person familiar with the field but not an expert in that particular area can understand generally what's going on. That's my ideal for a commit message as well: someone generally familiar with the codebase but who hasn't looked at this specific code (or perhaps not in a few months) should be able to understand what's going on; then the job of the reviewer is basically just verification. My "template" is normally something like: 1) What's the current situation 2) Why that's a problem 3) How this patch fixes it. So in this case, it might look something like this: --- Convert template to US-ASCII to fix error $functions use `.with_content(//)` matchers to do X. These matchers require ASCII content. The $foo template contains a non-ASCII space; this results in the following error: ArgumentError: invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII Fix this by replacing the non-ASCII space with an ASCII space. --- No need for a life story, but still searchable, and has enough information for even a casual contributor to do a useful review.