One of our sacred notions—never to be questioned—is the importance of writing good commit messages. There are hundreds of articles on how to write good messages and how to properly format them. Magit will even enforce a length limit on the first line.
But do those messages really matter? When you think about it, all the information that the conventional wisdom insists you include is easily available in finer detail elsewhere. In the case of Magit, it’s only a keypress away.
Matt Rickard makes the case that commit messages don’t matter and that our time is better spent elsewhere. My personal policy is to give a hint as to what the commit does and leave the details to diff or other appropriate commands. Once you get out of code police mode, it’s pretty clear that Rickard is right. But, of course, none of us want to get condemned for apostasy so we pretend to agree with the received wisdom.