alt Hacker NewsI mean you're not op but his comment was saying
> Interesting idea. But those say what’s in the commit. The commit diff already tells you that. The best commit messages IMO tell you why you did it and what value was delivered.
Which doesn't include what was done. Your example includes both which is fine. But not including what the commit does in the message is an antipattern imho. Everything else that is added is a bonus.
Many changes require multiple smaller changes, so this is not always possible.
For me the commit message should tell me the what/why and the diff is the how. It's great to understand if, for example, a change was intentional or a bug.
Many times when searching for the source of a bug I could not tell if the line changed was intentional or a mistake because the commit message was simply repeating what was on the diff. If you say your intention was to add something and the diff shows a subtraction, you can easily tell it was a mistake. Contrived example but I think it demonstrates my point.
This only really works if commits are meaningful though. Most people are careless and half their commits are 'fix this', 'fix again', 'wip', etc. At that point the only place that can contain useful information on the intentions are the pull requests/issues around it.
Take a single commit from the Linux kernel: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/08bd5b7c9a2401faabd... It doesn't tell me "add function X, Y and boolean flag Z". It tells us what/why it was done, and the diff shows us how.