Software lifetimes sometimes greatly exceed what you expect. 10 or 15 years down the road, you may look at your code, see something unusual, and want to know w

Software lifetimes sometimes greatly exceed what you expect. 10 or 15 years down the road, you may look at your code, see something unusual, and want to know when it was put there, why, and whether it is still appropriate. You'll be glad to have a detailed commit history to help decide. The audience for commit history is different than for release notes. So for example, you might fix a race condition for a specific situation and during debug, notice that there might be another related race condition (but maybe you're not sure it could actually happen). A comment about that in the commit log might be helpful down the road if that other race condition occurs later.