> The only thing I've found useful, and which the article doesn't even consider, is a link / id for the relevant change request. The commit already contains all the information about what was done in the change, what's missing is the context about why.

The "why" is THE thing that needs to go in the git commit message. Capturing "why" is the entire point of that message and slapping a link to some external (and eventually absent) resource is not a good substitute.

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bluGill 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I find bug trackers and source control fad change several times over the life of my code. A number from a ticket system we no longer use is not helpful.

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mmcnl an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

It is a good substitute.

1. Usually the commit message is often too short to capture the "why" adequately. 2. It is very beneficial to capture the why in one single source of truth, and that usually is not the Git commit message in a business context. Hate on Jira all you want, but if you capture the "why" there, you can add comments, view history, add rich context, link dependencies, add rich context, etc. Can't do that in a Git commit message.

	▲	eikenberry 19 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		My ire is more directed at github PRs than Jira... but the same basic idea applies. You want a single source of truth and you want that as close to the origin (the code) as possible. Your history, dependencies, etc. are all in git already and can be highlighted there if appropriate. For general comments, git notes covers that. Business (ie. $work) will dictate whatever it wants and that is what get used but for anything I personally have control over, everything goes in the repo itself to prevent platform lock-in. For example, github's been going downhilll lately but all those projects with their history in PRs, etc. now needs to exfiltrate all that data somehow.
	▲	jsve an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You can put that in the body of the commit message, not everything has to go in the subject line.