Why many commit messages are so short?

[vvaltchev]

(Question moved from the main README.md file.)

[vvaltchev]

It is well-known that all popular open source projects care about having good commit messages and nice git history. It is an investment that at some point pays off. A few years ago, I even wrote a blog post about that. The problem is that such investment actually starts paying off only when multiple people contribute to a project or the project is really mature enough. It took a long time for me to start considering Tilck as kind of mature. Actually, that's not even a binary value, it's a slow process instead: with time (and commits!), the project matured even if it still has a long way to go. Therefore, by looking at the commits from the initial one to today, it's possible to observe how they improved, both from the message point of view and from the content point of view as well. In particular, during the last ~1,000 commits I started not only re-ordering commits but to split, edit, and squash them all the time. Git's add -p became a friend too. That's because today Tilck is pretty stable and it starts to be a medium-sized project with its 97,000+ physical lines of code and a git history of 5,000+ commits. It deserves much more effort on each commit, compared to the past.

At the beginning, Tilck was just a small experimental and unstable project on which I worked alone in my free time. It had even a different name, ExperimentOS. Its source was also subject to drastic changes very often and I didn't have a clear roadmap for it either. It was an overkill to spend so much effort on each commit message as if I were preparing it for the Linux kernel. Tilck is still obviously not Linux so, don't expect to see 30+ lines of description for EVERY commit message from now on, BUT, the quality is raising through a gradual process and that's pretty natural. As other people start to contribute to the project, we all will have to raise further the bar in order to
the collaboration to succeed and being able to understand each other's code faster. Today, the project still doesn't have regular contributors other than myself and that's why many commits still have short commit messages.