Indeed the example is a bit extreme. Still it illustrate quite well what should be found in a commit message. It needs to tell a story and motivate the reasons behind a change.

A nice knowledge base about what is probably my favorite branching model. Goes in the variations you can have, the trade-offs and the other techniques you need to bring in for it to work well.

So, which team are you on when you think about commits in Git?

It looks like git workflows using rebase are becoming the norm. People are actively trying to avoid merge commits in their repository history. Tooling support could be a bit better though.

Back to the history of VCS, anyone still remember and used SCCS? Well, I did use it...

Interesting statistics, this show how important it is to have well structured and focused change sets as much as possible.

A good reference on most of the branching patterns you can find. From this you can derive your project wide policy. Also it's spot on when it says that branching is easy but each time you branch you need to keep in mind how you're going to merge.