Great observation, though it's not a bad thing, necessarily (assuming you were even implying that it was).
In fact, it could be a very good thing, especially if the alternative is, eg, dropdowns for type and scope, and a separate popup for editing or adding new ones, and so on.
Having the data model loosely encoded as text, and understood only by convention among humans, who can then improvise changes to that model in exceptional cases, relying on other humans to make sense of those changes even though they are "outside" the agreed-upon model, is sometimes exactly what you want.
Also, as UI for input, text is often the fastest and most efficient -- again, just what you want. Of course, you could always do string validation on the text input to enforce your model, so this can be considered an orthogonal point.
And these considerations don't even touch upon the increased complexity and maintenance costs that your tool itself (in this case, git) will incur if it takes on the burden of maintaining the data model explicitly.
The UX exists for the reader, the data model for the programmer. Sometimes, text is the best UX. For example, I love Markdown, a classic example of a data model serialized as text. I do not want a “rich editor” that speaks the data model directly.
Not exactly. The actual commit content is in the code difference. Code message is just some kind of human-readable abstract, or at least - a hit of what was changed.
There is a big deal of subjectivity (e.g. what is a bug, and what is a feature) but (as with any comments in the code) it is nice to see at least what was intended (e.g. someone wanted to position a misaligned button, or added it, or improved its visuals or optimized its click from O(n!) to O(1), ...).
So very true. And I struggle with this. "Why should I write something out when tools could do it for me? Isn't me specifying it, then, just me being overly verbose?" But tools often don't - and may never.
I'm curious:
In any tool for any revision control system ever: in a list of commits, are the commit messages augmented with something useful beyond the basics? ("Basics" being e.g. the first 'n' characters of the human-provided commit message, a revision identifier, a timestamp, and a username.)
Github has a way of linking issues with commits. You just mention the issue in the commit e.g. 'This commit closes #1' and i believe the issue will close with that as well, but it will show up in the issue.
Jira and other ticketing systems can often read repos and look for ticket ids. In my commits at work I just mention PRJCTNAME-142 and that'll link to a ticket and aggregate in jira all the commits/pull requeusts/branches... tagged with that
Our internal system has some integration between Jira and Github, such that if you comment a commit with the ticket number then you can see them all in the Jira ticket.
