Filed request: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-27531
On Sat, Dec 20, 2025 at 2:37 PM David Smiley <[email protected]> wrote: > I really care/believe in the value of thoughtful commit messages to > communicate what a change is all about. But many times I increasingly see > here (and wherever GHE is used, in my experience), a lack of care. A > committer is excited to see a PR merged and they just hit the big green > button on GitHub to squash merge without thinking the slightest bit about > the commit message (apparently!), despite resulting in lots of junk in > there (e.g. "tidy"). Perhaps it annoys me more than it should... but boy > does it ever. In a word, it's "sloppy". Moreover, it's a lost opportunity > to say something of value to a future reader, rather than a series of > rather draft-y notes that reflects the iteration process, not the final > product of what was actually merged in the end. > > Next week, I plan to ask ASF Infra to configure our project to change our > configuration so that the squash commit message default will be only the PR > title. This will be less convenient for me and those of you who use the > existing intermediate commit messages as a draft to compose something > good. We'll deal with it; we'll get by. But hopefully looking at a big > *blank* text box by that squash merge button will prompt a... "oh yeah, > gotta write something there" to go do that. If we find this change to be a > net negative, we can change back. > > note: I checked if .asf.yaml has an option for this -- it doesn't. So > I'll file an INFRA ticket referencing GHE docs: > https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/configuring-branches-and-merges-in-your-repository/configuring-pull-request-merges/configuring-commit-squashing-for-pull-requests > > ~ David Smiley > Apache Lucene/Solr Search Developer > http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidwsmiley >
