Git in Practice

Chapter 12. Creating a clean history

This chapter covers

• Writing a good commit message
• Building a commit using only certain changes in a file
• Building a commit using a graphical application
• Avoiding committing bad whitespace

You saw in technique 4 that a clean history can make it easier to find useful information. For a history to be clean, it should use good, well-formatted commit messages for commits that are as small as possible. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to create a clean history.

12.1. Writing a good commit message

Technique 4 explained why small commits are better and how commit messages should be formatted. Let’s go into more detail about what makes a good format when writing commit messages, and why.

The following listing ...