Dear Stéfan,

Since I just did *not* do it :s ... I realize that it could/should be the responsibility of the core dev who is squashing and merging to reword, if necessary, the 'main' commit message (which, if left unchanged, ends up being the PR title) and, perhaps(?), even the secondary commit messages (corresponding to the original individual commits).

If anything, I would think that squash merges improve the situation, otherwise those 'long list[s] of items like "polish things up a bit" and "more verbose"' end up linearly in the main commit history (https://github.com/scikit-image/scikit-image/commits/main)... which is even worse, isn't it?  Am I missing something?

Otherwise, I believe in:

* adding a line about commit messages in https://scikit-image.org/docs/stable/contribute.html;

* spreading the word about good/standard commit messages whenever we get a chance, whether formally or informally (e.g., https://github.com/scikit-image/scikit-image/pull/5479#issuecomment-881948156).

Cheers,

Marianne