Cream Desktop Environment

Cream Desktop Environment v0.0.6 documentation » Guidelines

Guidelines for Development

Micro Commits

There has always been a discussion on how to commit code changes. Some people tend to commit huge patches fixing a bug or implementing a new feature and some others try to keep their commits small. From a bigger project’s point of view it’s a lot easier to work with small and easy to follow commits than to review huge patches and get lost in tons of changes.

Therefore we would recommend a higher frequency of smaller commits than just a single commit every few days. For more reasons for this recommendation please refer to Lucas Rocha’s great blog article Micro Commits on the very same topic.

Commit Messages

Let’s make this one short and clear:

Good Commit Message

Added class `Bar` to `cream.foo`, fixing http://bit.ly/fLxmLN.

A good commit message should

  • consist of a complete (although maybe elliptic) and grammatically correct English sentence,
  • refer to the changed code in a correct and easy to follow way and
  • make clear what you intended with the commit.
  • The title should be max 80 chars long. If your commit needs more explanation, then use a short title and put the explanation into the body of the commit.

Bad Commit Message

added class bar to cream.foo