Chris Mariana has an interesting post about making Git commit messages with Magit. Well crafted commit messages, he says, can tell a story about your project than can valuable in the future. The secret is in the “well crafted” part.
Rather than a bunch of messages like “Small edits” or “tweaked the foobar”, your commit message should describe what you actually did. Maiorana is a writer and his examples reflect a writing project rather than coding but everything he says applies regardless of what type of files you’re committing. Take a look at his post for examples of both good and bad commit messages.
The other nice thing about his post is that he shows how to use Git reporting to do some rough analysis. Magit, of course, has easy ways of doing this. Again, see Maiorana’s post for the details.
Finally, he offers some suggestions for writing better commit messages. These are aimed more at the story writer than the coder but, again, they can help someone writing code too;
I must admit to being guilty of writing terrible commit messages, especially for my blog posts. I’m very apt to use Maiorana’s example of “minor edit” instead of saying what I actually fixed. Sometimes, it just fixing a typo in which case “fixed typo” is fine but usually it’s something more extensive and a meaningful commit message helps me locate the commit I’m looking for.