Good commit messages

Git Cola provided a very nice dialog explaining me how to improve my commit message:

A good commit message has the following format: * First line: Describe in one sentence what you did. * Second line: Blank * Remaining lines: Describe why this change is good.

I did some additional research and found some good other guidelines. from stack overflow

And one entire article on Git commit messages

Short (50 chars or less) summary of changes More detailed explanatory text, if necessary. Wrap it to about 72 characters or so. In some contexts, the first line is treated as the subject of an email and the rest of the text as the body. The blank line separating the summary from the body is critical (unless you omit the body entirely); tools like rebase can get confused if you run the two together. Write your commit message in the present tense: "Fix bug" and not "Fixed bug." This convention matches up with commit messages generated by commands like git merge and git revert. Further paragraphs come after blank lines. - Bullet points are okay, too - Typically a hyphen or asterisk is used for the bullet, preceded by a single space, with blank lines in between, but conventions vary here - Use a hanging indent

Good commit messages make developers happy. Maybe not while writing them, but at least in the future when looking for something done in the past. Or when looking at other teammember’s work.