I'm glad this is the case where you work and develop. I have never worked at a company where this is the case. I'm also not perfect about commit messages in my personal code. The codebase I'm currently working on has recent commits with description "review", "add addressDto" and "post rebase fix".
> >which I think a mercurial-style branch name answers.
> I find that extremely suspect.
Ok. If I see "add addressDto" as a part of the branch "google-geocoding", that tells me the context. If I see it as part of "refactor-to-use-hibernate", that also tells me something useful.
I guess what I don't get, is that if you have people doing commit messages like that, how can you possibly expect them to appropriately name a branch which most likely stores far less characters.
Just recently I had to triage a recently discovered bug whose symptoms disappeared about 4 years ago to determine if the bug was fixed or just masked. This was code that I was completely unfamiliar with because the other engineers that might have looked at it were otherwise indisposed working on things that were known for sure to be issues.
The "what" told me the specific change that masked the bug and the "why" informed me of the feature that this supported. That allowed me to generate a new test-case that showed up in the current version. Without both pieces of information I would likely have had to spend a couple of hours inspecting code changes to do the same.
Believe it or not, there were times in the last 20 years when there was insufficient review of commit messages!
Please elaborate how this helps you in long-term branches, instead of just assuming long-term branches aren't something most people deal with on a daily basis.
>you might be happy to have a tool that helps untangle the web of merges somewhat.
This has no relation to long-term branches, this happens with any kind of normal history, and even shared history between repositories (which is a far messier thing to untangle). Yet this feature is unneeded, because the information can be correctly found within git in an accurate and not misleading fashion.
And to make sure no one responds with some silly "just because you don't have a use for it, doesn't mean don't have their uses for it": I get what you're trying to say. I'm really just not buying it as an actual use case. If your commit message isn't sufficient enough to explain the purpose of the commit (ticket numbers, explanation, etc), it doesn't get approved. If you're relying on a <20 character branch name to give you sufficient context about a commit a year later, I simply have no words.
>which I think a mercurial-style branch name answers.
I find that extremely suspect.