How do you manage git commit messages that need to have Jira issue Id updated after push?

Question

It is not infrequent that after a commit is made in git and subsequently pushed upstream (we use Atlassian Stash), the commit message is realized to contain the incorrect Jira issue Id.

Any documentation I have seen regarding modification of git messages after pushing to a shared repository says simply don't do it. Yet it is common to find commits related to the wrong Jira ticket. With svn, it was fairly trivial to update the relevant commit message - we just notified eveyone to update cached logs. It seems not so easy with git.

So, I am curious whether anyone has found a way to resolve these seemingly conflicting needs: git's need to not change history and Jira's need to change git history to associate commits with the correct issue.

Ken Taylor · Accepted Answer

One approach would be to remove Jira's dependency on the commit message and maintain the associations between Jira ID and commits outside of git. I have not found any existing solution with this approach but I do have a feature request for it at Atlassian [JRA-33338]. Please vote for it while there.