Is it considered rude to use commits as comments in VCS's.

Question

For example in git you could do

git commit --allow-empty -m"I like what this guy did"

I was considering using commits as a commenting system, and I just wanted to see how that would go over.

Answer 1

Uh, SCMs are not considered appropriate for this usage. You may find yourself without commit rights rather quickly if you try this.

Answer 2

Don't. SCMs are for source code control, tracking changes over time, managing branches, not a chat forum. Just don't.

Answer 3

If you are wanting to comment on a specific commit, git-notes allows you to do just that.

Answer 4

You already heard that this is a bad idea, but this wasn't rationalized. The fact that SCM is not ment to be a forum, doesn't mean it shouldn't be one.

The reason this is a bad idea is that SCM is often being used to search the history for important/problematic commits. Adding unrelated noise to the SCM will make this job harder.

You wouldn't want to search for a commit message you vaguely recall the phrases "like this one" appears in it, and find plethora of messages of the form.

I like this one.