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Comment by dasmoth | Hacker News Reader

This seems to have become really pervasive the last few years, and I recognise it’s sometimes driven by regulatory/certification requirements. But in the absence of those, what does this gain you over putting a sentence or three of human-readable motivation into the commit message?

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All the context from the issue that doesn't fit in a sentence or three?. Of course it depends, if the issue doesn't have context it's not important, but things like "who requested/reported this", "who was involved in decisions made", "what alternatives were considered and why where they rejected" might not necessarily fit in the commit message but exist in an issue.

If there's stuff that's valuable, I'd prefer to see it pasted into the commit message -- far less likely for links to get broken.

If it's long term valuable, i.e. "I considered obvious, attractive alternative algorithm X but it failed horribly because of Y", I'd prefer that to go in a comment in the code instead. Far more likely to still be noticed in three years time, after the code's been run through two different auto-formatters and otherwise mangled around.

So when you look at the Jira story you know where it is. When you deploy some code, how do you know what you actually deployed? You could look at the competed stories, but it's not that solid as checking merges with that story number

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