A good dev isnt necessarily a good writer. Summarising complexity concisely is difficult.
Restrictions lead devs to write to useless messages like 'fixed a bug' rather than messages that are slightly verbose but actually useful.
Most messages wont be 200 chars. But id rather 200 chars of useful text than 72chars of useless text.
The real world is full of average devs that are average writers under time pressure to deliver code. Expecting them to deliver above average commit messages like googles examples is a pipe dream.
Should this reasoning be applied to other skills involved in software engineering? If someone never writes tests, or over-architects everything, or has terrible people skills, or never updates documentation, or doesn't bring attention to blockers, or constantly forgets to update the issue tracker, or doesn't follow the local code conventions, or works on random tasks and ignores high-priority ones, etc etc etc the solution isn't usually "don't ask them to do a thing they're bad at", it's "help them get better".
The important question is whether "skimmable commit messages" is a thing you care about enough to advocate for and teach people about. Maybe you don't, and that's fine.
> But id rather 200 chars of useful text than 72chars of useless text.
I completely agree with this. I just don't think those are the only two options.
> Expecting them to deliver above average commit messages like googles examples is a pipe dream.
This thread started with praise for that Google guide and I assumed you were of similar opinion given your reply. That's why I kept referring to it.
1. I basically agree with everything you say, I only think the limit should be ~50-100% higher. Not 10x, but 1.5-2x.
2. For some reason, concise writing is the hardest thing to teach and demand consistently. I think a part of is that people try to hide incompetence behind a word salad, but also I think non-native speakers use more words than they need. It gets to a point where you either have to become everyone's English teacher or accept some amount of word salad.
Restrictions lead devs to write to useless messages like 'fixed a bug' rather than messages that are slightly verbose but actually useful.
Most messages wont be 200 chars. But id rather 200 chars of useful text than 72chars of useless text.
The real world is full of average devs that are average writers under time pressure to deliver code. Expecting them to deliver above average commit messages like googles examples is a pipe dream.