I tell them that if you make two related changes, in two different parts of the codebase, the commit message is the only thing that "binds" them, and should be

I tell them that if you make two related changes, in two different parts of the codebase, the commit message is the only thing that "binds" them, and should be approached as if it was a comment. I guess I'm saying that commit messages are comments but with more flexible scope. (Now if I could just get them to squash, rebase and rewrite commit messages before publishing...)