“Have you linted and unit tested your commit message?”
“Junior Developer wanted. 10 years of Conventional Commits experience required.”
“Download Conventionalizer! Now you can write Conventional Commits in plain English, having all the syntax automatically generated! (node, erlang OTP and Jerry’s pre-alpha TensorFlow binding library required. Windows support coming soon.)”
Something tells me the authors are hard at work solving a problem nobody needs solving.
I share some of your sentiment though: I feel like the biggest reason to enforce a style like this is not for "machine readable commit messages" (I mean, why?), but to encourage people to split refactors and features in separate commits. This makes it easier to understand what's going on later.
I think this site should've begun with that, and left the spec as a footnote.
We use this in our lerna monorepo and it works like a charm as the CI can just bump whatever packages based on the paths and commit messages.
The machine-readable part is useful for generating changelogs (eg. broken out by type) or implementing semver (eg. detecting breaking changes).
instead of 'feat:', why not 'feature:'?
I dislike partial abbreviation because it is confusing; yes doc for document and max for maximum make sense but in this case feat is literally a different word?
Before:
> feat: allow provided config object to extend other configs
After
> Add option for config object to extend other configs
I know this isn't the point of changelogs, but I've been using the verbs from KeepAChangelog to start my commit messages and it's been going well so far.
> Add template preview to status page
> Change textarea to increase height on `:focus`
> Remove deprecated CLI flags
> Fix margin styles causing layout problems
Setting that aside, the conventional commit "standard" (https://xkcd.com/927/) doesn't focus on what I think is the most important aspect of a commit: a good commit subject and message. In fact, prefixing the subject line with certain tags limits the amount of characters you have for writing the message; assuming you want to stick with the usual 50 character limit.
It's pedantic to me. I'm completly fine with terse incomplete sentences. They are not harder to understand. Plus I work with international teams. Terse is often easier to write and understand for non-native speakers.
I like my "Feature" much more than "feat". This is my default commit message that I edit to contain what I want:
<Type>: <Description>
# Type can be:
# - Feature: A new feature
# - Bugfix: A bug fix
# - Docs: Documentation only changes
# - Styling: Changes that do not affect the meaning of the code (white-space, formatting, missing semi-colons, etc)
# - Refactor: A code change that neither fixes a bug nor adds a feature
# - Performance: A code change that improves performance
# - Tests: Adding missing tests
# - Chore: Changes to the build process or auxiliary tools and libraries such as documentation generation
From my experience, a few characters less do matter (which is also why I dropped conventional commits and just use "Add blah blah to blah", "Fix typo in user-facing message").
I much prefer encoding structured information like this at the ticket level where history can be more easily corrected and items are expected to be visible for all of time.
https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Change-Logs.htm...
This widely used format gives details about what is being done to each function.
This was designed to be used in a ChangeLog file, so it has to be adopted for repository use. We don't have to record the date and name, since that is in the commit meta-data. WE write a commit title, and then the ChangeLog entry becomes the details placed after the blank line. That entry is mandatory: no title-only commits! There can be one or more discussion paragraphs between the title and the ChangeLog entry. We know that these paragraphs aren't ChangeLog entry material because they don't begin with the asterisk.
Like this: http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/txr/commit/?id=b2739251281d7f6ef...
However, I don't find it that useful in the the final applications, even counter productive, since it typically will take up quite a bit of space in the commit title. Many of our front end devs completely ignore title length conventions now.
I see this in nearly every company I go to - everyone rushing to skip over adding anything useful to the permanent log by using git commit -m rather than a plain got commit.
The main problem is very commit titles that end up looking like:
feat(SomeScope.OtherScope.Class): add support for abc and xyz optionhttps://github.com/probot/semantic-pull-requests
It obviously won't catch your mistake if you forget to mark a breaking change as breaking, but it's a start.
Right now, we are switching SCM's and are looking at adopting Conventional to replace our internal style. I've already started using Conventional and have really appreciated it. It makes it fast and succinct (remember, line length "requirements" in git) to get the information you need even in one-line logs. Also, it makes CHANGELOG maintenance easier, whether using an automated tool or doing it by-hand.
Not happy with the other ones, I've created my own commit style validation tool, committed [0] and have deployed it on my open source projects. Like code style enforcement in CI, I like delegating this to a tool since it makes the requirement very clear for contributors.
The one thing I'm disappointed with with Conventional is that they did not follow git conventions for multi-line trailers.
Haven’t figured out a good way to integrate co-authors easily with it though.
"body", optionally, describes WHY.
Also it feels like more of a convention for a personal project with optional C(I|D) automation prerequisites. In a team there should be a clear and emphasized place for the issue tracking info (ticket number, task id etc etc)
“ The last thing to keep in mind is the commit message. Getting in the habit of creating quality commit messages makes using and collaborating with Git a lot easier. As a general rule, your messages should start with a single line that’s no more than about 50 characters and that describes the changeset concisely, followed by a blank line, followed by a more detailed explanation. The Git project requires that the more detailed explanation include your motivation for the change and contrast its implementation with previous behavior — this is a good guideline to follow. Write your commit message in the imperative: "Fix bug" and not "Fixed bug" or "Fixes bug."”
Similarly there are rare cases where I’ve swept breaking changes under the rug because they were severe bug or security fixes that affected a corner case unlikely to be seen in the wild.
After all the commit message is secondary to the actual code committed.
I'm sure everyone can share an episode when a nicely worded commit had to be followed up with an ugly 'Fix a typo' message.
The most practical convention is the one that's automated to some degree, for example, issue/feature tag auto-linking or some template driven messages. Either way the message should not become an ultimate hoop to jump before the actual commit and one more thing to 'maintain', the code should be the focus.
In my experience, a commit message describing the committed behavior (even when intended) helps tie the code to the overall scope. In case when it's a bugfix, it still must be tied to a correct expected behavior.
So in some sense a commit message could serve as an auxilliary level of unit testing. Of course, I'd rather put an effort to enforce the actual practice of unit testing over structuring the commit messages.
There is `git commit --fixup` and `git rebase -i --autosquash` for that ;)
This actually had me laughing quite a bit. Because of my love for dad jokes, here are some less conventional commits:
"fete" : adding holiday support
"braking change" : a change of pace
"nix" : removing a featute
"suffix" : adding a nice to have
https://github.com/lerna/lerna/blob/master/commands/version/...
They are metadata, and as such they shouldn't take more attention than the actual data.
This matters when you are in a bug hunt in production - you want to find the culprit commit as efficiently as possible, without distractions.