> The main issue is that most of the tooling (in Git or GitHub or whatever) generally only shows the first line. So in the case of this commit example would be

> The main issue is that most of the tooling (in Git or GitHub or whatever) generally only shows the first line. So in the case of this commit example would be the very simple message of a generic "US-ASCII error" problem. This is a feature, and a crucial one. No one would include fifty lines of explanation if everyone had to see it. It would be better to throw the information away than to inflict it on everyone who was scanning through the commit history looking for a particular change. Yet it is valuable information that only makes sense in the context of that change. There is nothing in the corrected version you can connect to the issue that was fixed. It's obnoxious to include comments about errors that have been removed, like this: # where civica QueryPayments calls are taking too long # use ASCII whitespace (This is ridiculous, but not unrealistic. I've seen code comments that said things like "# removed syntax error in invocation of query generator." This is what you get from programmers trying to juice their LOC stats.) The commit message is the right place for this kind of information, but most people reading the commit messages don't care. They're scanning through looking for something else, and all they need is a few words that tell them if this is the commit they're looking for. The person who needs to see the full story is the person who is interested in this change in particular. Maybe they found it by grepping the git log for "invalid byte sequence". Maybe they found it because they're looking at all the changes in that file, because some tooling that occasional modifies that file keeps messing it up. What matters is that if they have a special interest in that change, they have a way to see whatever information they committer felt was worth preserving, and the committer has a place to put that information where only someone with a special interest will see it.