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

Something that very much helped me in working out what I was committing, and why, was moving our repository organisation over to the 'feature branch' model, as popularised by the Git Flow extension.

By having branches describing each feature (or update, bugfix etc) that is being worked on, commits become less about the feature and more about how you are going about implementing that feature. For example, I was recently fixing a timezone bug within its own bugfix branch (bugfixes/gh-87 for example), and the commits were split up into what was done or the server side and the front end, and within the tests. Because all of this was happening on a branch dedicated to that bug, (with a GitHub issue number too, for clarity and auto closing), my commits were seen as the incremental steps in solving that problem, and so required less explanation as to why I was doing them.