Kurt von Laven <kurt.von.laven@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > The most common reason commit messages are left empty is to abort > them. commit-msg hooks that replace empty commit messages with > non-empty ones (i) make it impossible to abort commits, (ii) are > startling to developers joining a project configured in this manner, > and (iii) can offer no value that wouldn't be equally or better > offered another way. For instance, a default commit message would be > better implemented as a commit message template or prepare-commit-msg > hook. I propose that Git eventually cease calling commit-msg hooks > when the commit-message is empty, but I would understand if backwards > compatibility were the overriding concern. On the other hand, the > empty commit message case is easy to overlook when crafting a > commit-msg hook. One consequence of this behavior is that running the > popular pre-commit tool (https://pre-commit.com/) tends to lead to a > spew of false positives to the console on an aborted commit when > configured with commit-msg hooks. The primary reason commit-msg hook is there is *not* because we need a way to tweak the log message. As you said, prepare-commit-msg and templates are much better way to give some sort of default. The purpose of the hook is to serve as the gatekeeper to cause an attempt with a bad commit message to fail. And a properly written commit-msg hook would be rejecting an empty message, instead of inserting cruft into an empty message file. So, from that point of view, if we were to change anything, a more useful thing to do might be to forbid commit-msg hook from modifying the file and make sure it would only verify but not modify, I suspect. Doing so would have a side effect of making sure that no commit-msg hook will turn an empty message file into a non-empty message file ;-).
