git commit best practices

Question

I am using git to manage a C++ project. When I am working on the projects, I find it hard to organize the changes into commits when changing things that are related to many plac

Answer 1

I tend to commit as you propose: a commit is a logically connected change set. My commits can be anything from a one-liner to a change in all files (for example add/change a copyright notice in the source files). The reason for change need not be a full task that I am implementing, but it is usually a milestone in the task.

If I have modified something that is not related to my current commit, I tend to do an interactive add to separate out the unrelated changes, too - even when it is a whitespace tidy up.

I have found that commits that simply dump the working state to repository makes them a lot less useful: I cannot backport a bugfix to an earlier version or include a utility functionality in another branch easily if the commits are all over the place.

One alternative to this approach is using a lot of tiny commits inside a feature branch, and once the whole feature is done, do heavy history rewriting to tidy up the commits into a logical structure. But I find this approach to be a time waster.