Developers can be encouraged to do the right thing, or developers can be forced to do the right thing. However, in the end, developers need to spend time coding. So, if a good commit message is required, we can use the prepare-commit-msg hook to assist the developer.

In this example, we will create a commit message for developers that contains information about the state of the work area. It will also insert some information from a web page. This could just as well be defect information from Bugzilla.