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Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

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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