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Comment by mattmichielsen | Hacker News Reader

I actually enjoy witty and clever commit messages. Just the other day one of my coworkers really enjoyed a commit message where I wrote "upgrayedd" instead of "upgrade".

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My guess is that the idea to put that in the commit just came to you. So you didn't necessarily go against his advice:

> Don’t try to be clever, witty or funny.

I've worked with someone who did sit around thinking what to put in a commit, and believe me, he didn't commit as often as he should have.

No, it was pretty spontaneous, as the particular individual who typically works with me on that project and I were having a conversation about Idiocracy just hours prior to that.

Until you try to search through your history for everywhere you upgraded something...

I write my fair share of terrible commit messages, too. It always bites me in the ass eventually.

I feel like a better approach for that sort of solution would be to use a hash-tag based (#) tagging system. English has so many tenses and people mis-spell things anyways that basing your search purely off of the text of the commit message is always going to be tricky. Anyways, the point of the commit message is that it be human readable, not machine readable.

Personally, I like clever commit messages. They remind me that the project was written by humans for humans.

It's impossible to know what you'll need in the future, and you can't effectively go back and look for tags, though.

My approach is to add silly things in as fluff, not as the message itself.

    The frobnicator now frobnicates.

becomes

    The frobnicator now frobnicates, omgh4x!!!11

or whatever. Make sure you've got enough _real_ information there, and some light extra whatever is fine.

Then again, sometimes, you really need good commit messages: http://github.com/shoes/shoes/commit/95fed5e6310cb0174ba80b8...

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