They are beyond invaluable for us, but we use githooks+shell to enforce the structure of the commit messages. Sounds authoritarian, I know, but this is MIL-STD

They are beyond invaluable for us, but we use githooks+shell to enforce the structure of the commit messages. Sounds authoritarian, I know, but this is MIL-STD stuff. The specs require detailed accounts of every change, so it's pretty important to be able to summarize them accurately.