Commit message language is a per-repo decision — and the automation template needs updating too

It’s easy to assume commit message language is consistent by default — until one repo turned out not to be.

The mismatch found

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The site itself was English-facing, but its commit log was mostly Korean. The outward-facing text (the site) and the not-outward-facing text (the commit history) had drifted into different languages.

Decision

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• Scope: commit messages only. Code comments and chat replies stay Korean.
• New commits only, going forward. The six existing Korean commits were left untouched — force-pushing a public branch to rewrite history for a purely cosmetic reason isn’t worth the risk.

# history stays as-is. none of this:
git rebase -i --root
git push --force

The easy-to-miss spot: commits automation generates

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It’s tempting to think the job is done once human-authored commits switch to English. This repo also had a daily GitHub Actions workflow that generates its own commit message. Miss that template, and the automated commits keep landing in Korean.

# .github/workflows/daily.yml — the part that got missed
- run: |
    git commit -m "데일리 업데이트: $(date +%F)"   # this needed fixing too

    git commit -m "Daily update: $(date +%F)"

Takeaway

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Changing a commit message convention means checking both “commits a human types” and “commits automation types” separately. The latter is quick to find with a grep across the repo’s workflows.

grep -rn "git commit -m" .github/workflows/