My favourite Git commit (2019)

My favourite Git commit (2019)
dhwthompson.com

> I wouldn’t expect all commits (especially ones of this size) to have this level of detail.

(emphasis added) - actually in my experience it's often the little ones, innocuous looking things that might really need a relatively longer explanation.

Yesterday I wrote three paragraphs on why I added `--limit=999` to a `gh pr list` because it's confusing: there's already a `limit(` in the `--jq` argument, and the higher it is (given say infinite PRs in total) the lower the end result will actually be. (Yes I wrote a comment too. And probably spent even longer thinking about and working it up than writing about it; hopefully I'll recall it as an example the next time someone implies the job is about churning out code!)

It’s a bit sad, but I have a growing suspicion that beautiful commit messages are a bit of vanity by the programmer. The person primarily impressed is often the author; others will walk on by without noticing.

There is room sometimes for those aesthetic flourishes but I am not convinced they have much practical value, and I have stopped really being bothered by commit messages of “fix whitespace issue” from others. I think I am a better colleague for that.

Things might be different on a project like Git or Linux with huge distributed teams and tons of commits, versus the projects I am used to which have between 1 and 100 contributors, mostly from the same organization.

I never understood why a "stylistic" choice requires separate characters. If we don't need a serif and non-serif version of every character and instead leave it to the software, why can't we do the same with the "smart" quotes?