> Ticket numbers are great for linking commits together. But they should not have to be relied on to find out why a change was made.
In theory I agree. In practice, I've yet to see it work out that way - there are always discussions with clients/other departments in the ticketing system which will never appear in the commit messages. References to logs, screenshots/animations of the issue and other things that give the full context to why that change matters.
That's also why I believe that code alone is not enough - you need code comments to explain not what the code does, but why it does it that way etc., it's just that ticketing systems can provide even more of the surrounding information which also doesn't fit either in commit messages, or in code comments.
> Ticketing systems may come and go but commit messages persist.
I'd say that everything comes and goes, but in most cases you won't have to worry too much, since most information will be kept around in some capacity, like migrating SVN revision messages to Git commit messages (though even that wasn't always quite possible, in the case of non-standard repository layouts, since most migration scripts broke) etc.
Though with how deeply integrated some companies out there are with solutions like Jira, I doubt they'll ever rid themselves of it.
In theory I agree. In practice, I've yet to see it work out that way - there are always discussions with clients/other departments in the ticketing system which will never appear in the commit messages. References to logs, screenshots/animations of the issue and other things that give the full context to why that change matters.
That's also why I believe that code alone is not enough - you need code comments to explain not what the code does, but why it does it that way etc., it's just that ticketing systems can provide even more of the surrounding information which also doesn't fit either in commit messages, or in code comments.
> Ticketing systems may come and go but commit messages persist.
I'd say that everything comes and goes, but in most cases you won't have to worry too much, since most information will be kept around in some capacity, like migrating SVN revision messages to Git commit messages (though even that wasn't always quite possible, in the case of non-standard repository layouts, since most migration scripts broke) etc.
Though with how deeply integrated some companies out there are with solutions like Jira, I doubt they'll ever rid themselves of it.