Is reference to bug/issue in commit message considered good practice?

Posted by Christian P on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Christian P
Published on 2011-11-24T20:33:43Z Indexed on 2011/11/25 2:17 UTC
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version-control

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programming-practices

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pragmatism

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commit-log

I'm working on a project where we have the source control set up to automatically write notes in the bug tracker. We simply write the bug issue ID in the commit message and the commit message is added as a note to the bug tracker.

I can see only a few downsides for this practice. If sometime in the future the source code gets separated from the bug tracking software (or the reported bugs/issues are somehow lost). Or when someone is looking in the history of commits but doesn't have access to our bug tracker.

My question is if having a bug/issue reference in the commit message is considered good practice? Are there some other downsides?

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