Sam Hames

interblah.net - Two thoughts about maintainable software

Starts with the idea that the 'why' of software is important, and needs to be captured. Then looks at where to keep that why and suggests that the best place is actually in the commit messages, not the comments, because that better captures the temporal context of the changes.

I definitely agree with capturing that in the same repository as the code rather than spread out over many systems, but not sure I agree with just the commit messages. Regardless it's definitely worth thinking through the details for whatever project you're working on.