What constitutes a valid SCM message?

Question

I’m currently writing some hooks for a new SVN instance and I’d like some feedback on what criteria people believe should be applied to verify the commit message is sufficient. This particular SVN instance will be used by a broad range of developers with varying knowledge of SCM best practices.

I’m trying to strike a good balance between forcing enough information to properly describe the change but not becoming overzealous and making life difficult on people who have succinct yet perfectly valid messages. The sort of thing I’m trying to reject is messages like “updated” or “added file” so limits on word count and message length are the obvious choices.

What other criteria would you use to reject messages which don’t properly describe the change? Please keep responses focussed on how you would qualify a satisfactory message; I’m acutely aware of the social need for education and this is happening in parallel.

BTW, don’t need to worry about references to work items or bugs in this particular case.

Answer 1

I honestly think that any specific criteria as a hard requirement is absolutely worthless. If you've ever seen a website which requires a minimum number of characters in a review/comment (dealextreme, and even this site come to mind) you will quickly realize that the effect just isn't what you want. Instead of people insuring that reviews and comments are longer, they'll just find more filler to make sure they hit the known and hardcoded minimums.

Ultimately the problem has to be dealt with as a social rather than a technical problem. Each instance of an inappropriately uninformative comment needs to be brought to the attention of the person doing it and explained to them.

This still won't solve the problem 100%, but its the closest approach to working that I've found.

Having said all of that, I'd be really surprised if someone can write consistently good cvs comments in fewer than about 40 characters. :)