Why is it considered good practice to describe git commits in the present tense?

git commit commit-message
Madara's Ghost picture Madara's Ghost · Dec 13, 2012 · Viewed 9.8k times · Source

I've read all kinds of Git tutorials, including the official one, and they all seem to tell me it's good convention and practice to write Git commit notes in the present tense.

Why is that? What is the reasoning behind it?

Answer

Shiplu Mokaddim picture Shiplu Mokaddim · Dec 13, 2012

Git is a distributed VCS (version control system). Multiple people can work on the same projects. It'll get changes from many sources.
Rather than writing messages that say what a committer has done. It's better to consider these messages as the instructions for what is going to be done after the commit is applied on the repo.

So write a message like this

Fix bug#1234

Instead of

Fixed bug #1234

Treat the git log not a history of your actions, but a sequence descriptions of what all the commits do.

There is a big thread on hacker news about it. There you'll get many more reasons behind this convention.

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