A commit can be seen as a changeset. A changeset can be formatted as a patch. Projects like Git and Linux take their contributions in as patches that are sent

A commit can be seen as a changeset. A changeset can be formatted as a patch. Projects like Git and Linux take their contributions in as patches that are sent to the projects mailing list. As it is not merged in to the master tree at the time of publishing, it would not make sense to use past tense for describing what it should do, if merged. Thanks to Git's great history-graph altering functions like rebase and cherry-picking, it would make even less sense. You can always take some commit and apply it to new branches or even repositories.