What is an appropriate level of detail for check-in notes?

Question

When I check-in code, I sometime write very long, detailed checkin notes, other times I write very short ones (or no note at all). The longer notes tend to include information about why the change was made (business reasons, customer interactions, etc). However, I'm not sure if check-in notes are the right place for such detail. Most check-in notes I've seen tend to be short and simply reference a bug.

What is an appropriate level of detail for check-in notes?

Answer 1

Whatever your manager or company documentation tells you ;)

That being said, shorter is better. It's not the correct tool for lengthy documentation - your bug/feature tracking software is built for this and in most cases, can integrate with your source control.

Answer 2

Just enough so, when following the log few weeks later to have an idea about what hapenned.

I use these logs to check what has been done in the last day (or days) in the project I'm leading.

Shorter messages doesn't necessary mean better. Nor longer messages. Just keep in mind the goal of those comments: to give an overview of the activity on versioning system.