3.4 Writing good commit messages

Your commit message should begin with a one-line summary describing the change (no more than 50 characters long), and if necessary a blank line followed by more explanatory text (wrapped at 72 characters). Here is how a good commit message looks like:

Doc: add Baerenreiter and Henle solo cello suites

Added comparison of solo cello suite engravings to new essay with
high-resolution images.  Fixed cropping on Finale example.

Closes #1234.

The “Closes” part is specially recognized by GitLab. See the documentation for closing issues automatically.

Commit messages often start with a short prefix describing the general location of the changes. Commits affecting the documentation in English (or in several languages simultaneously) should be prefixed with “Doc:”. When the commit affects only one of the translations, use “Doc-**:”, where ** is the two-letter language code. For the website, this is “Web:” or “Web-**”. Commits that change CSS files should use “Web: CSS” or “Doc: CSS:”. Finally, changes to a single file are often prefixed with the name of the file involved.

The imperative form, e.g. “Include this in that”, is strongly preferred over the descriptive form “That is now included in this”.

See also this blog post for details on how to write good commit messages.