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Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things

sumnerevans.com

131–140 of 294 posts

Re: Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things

#131

As programmers I feel like we'll always nitpick and bitch over what the optimal setup is for rather mundane things (tabs v spaces, yada yada). I'm not saying that conventional commits are God's given best way to structure a commit message, but they are a defined structure , and I find it much more effective and important that some expectations be set around commit messages, and I think conventional commits are as goo…

Who reads commit messages anyway?

Re: Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things

#132

The real takeaway is that different projects have different requirements. In over 30 years of using source control, I've never once worked on something where it's useful to include the component (article calls it scope) in the description in a standardised way. It's obvious what components are affected based on where in the source tree the affected files are. Similarly "bug", "fix" or "feature" adds no useful value.…

This is the way we did it when we used JIRA. For GH issues you can always navigate back to the PR discussion (which should have linked issues and other pointers in it) from the commit. Of course when we switched to GH issues, we largely abandoned JIRA and years later the instance got turned off and deleted. Now all those JIRA tags are entirely useless. IMO that actually argues for tight coupling between your issue tr…

> we largely abandoned JIRA and years later the instance got turned off and deleted

Sorry to be nitpicky, but why did you abandon a tool that contained a lot of valuable knowledge? That's not the fault of GH nor JIRA, that's your fault. At least you'd back up descriptions + comments from these JIRA sources.

Re: Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things

#133

The real takeaway is that different projects have different requirements. In over 30 years of using source control, I've never once worked on something where it's useful to include the component (article calls it scope) in the description in a standardised way. It's obvious what components are affected based on where in the source tree the affected files are. Similarly "bug", "fix" or "feature" adds no useful value.…

> The only thing I've found useful, and which the article doesn't even consider, is a link / id for the relevant change request. The commit already contains all the information about what was done in the change, what's missing is the context about why. The "why" is THE thing that needs to go in the git commit message. Capturing "why" is the entire point of that message and slapping a link to some external (and eventu…

It is a good substitute.

1. Usually the commit message is often too short to capture the "why" adequately. 2. It is very beneficial to capture the why in one single source of truth, and that usually is not the Git commit message in a business context. Hate on Jira all you want, but if you capture the "why" there, you can add comments, view history, add rich context, link dependencies, add rich context, etc. Can't do that in a Git commit message.

Re: Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is useful if you automate generating release notes. Then your notes are grouped by new features first, then bug fixes after. This makes it a little easier for non-technical uses to read.

Commit messages are good release notes rarely.

That's right, but with AI help + some hallucination you can get nice looking release notes out of the worst mess of commits.

Re: Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things

#135
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only thing I've found useful, and which the article doesn't even consider, is a link / id for the relevant change request. The commit already contains all the information about what was done in the change, what's missing is the context about why. The "why" is THE thing that needs to go in the git commit message. Capturing "why" is the entire point of that message and slapping a link to some external (and eventu…

It is a good substitute. 1. Usually the commit message is often too short to capture the "why" adequately. 2. It is very beneficial to capture the why in one single source of truth, and that usually is not the Git commit message in a business context. Hate on Jira all you want, but if you capture the "why" there, you can add comments, view history, add rich context, link dependencies, add rich context, etc. Can't do…

You can put that in the body of the commit message, not everything has to go in the subject line.

Re: Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things

#136

The real takeaway is that different projects have different requirements. In over 30 years of using source control, I've never once worked on something where it's useful to include the component (article calls it scope) in the description in a standardised way. It's obvious what components are affected based on where in the source tree the affected files are. Similarly "bug", "fix" or "feature" adds no useful value.…

The handling of ticket numbers is covered in the FAQ (scroll to the bottom)

[edit] At the bottom of https://scopedcommits.com/ I mean

Re: Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things

#137
post #4

“The audience of a changelog is entirely different than the audience for a commit log! A changelog is user-facing” I'd say that ship has probably sailed. Most companies are happy with “Bug Fixes & Performance Improvements”. At least if they're not going to put the effort in, then a generated changelog is better than nothing.

He confuses changelog with release notes. Doesnt know how to name commits and probably doesnt know how to name symbols either. Skill issue and he’s sad, now in public. Move on…

Re: Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the way we did it when we used JIRA. For GH issues you can always navigate back to the PR discussion (which should have linked issues and other pointers in it) from the commit. Of course when we switched to GH issues, we largely abandoned JIRA and years later the instance got turned off and deleted. Now all those JIRA tags are entirely useless. IMO that actually argues for tight coupling between your issue tr…

> we largely abandoned JIRA and years later the instance got turned off and deleted Sorry to be nitpicky, but why did you abandon a tool that contained a lot of valuable knowledge? That's not the fault of GH nor JIRA, that's your fault. At least you'd back up descriptions + comments from these JIRA sources.

Like many tools defending their moats, tools like Jira don’t make it easy to get one’s data out.

Re: Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things

#139

As programmers I feel like we'll always nitpick and bitch over what the optimal setup is for rather mundane things (tabs v spaces, yada yada). I'm not saying that conventional commits are God's given best way to structure a commit message, but they are a defined structure , and I find it much more effective and important that some expectations be set around commit messages, and I think conventional commits are as goo…

Defined structure does not constitute quality. A commit message can be loosely structured, but be very insightful and good at communicating the nature of the change. On the flip side, one can make a very structured but confusing or non-informative commit message. I generally tend to agree with the author, conventional commits do not solve the core issue of the poor commit messages problem.

Conventional commits made it easier to generate changelogs and automate semantic version bumps. I suppose LLMs can usually do that the right way with looser structure, but in the before times it made a lot more sense, and even now is much less ambiguous

Re: Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things

#140

There's no benefit to any of this. Just write like human. It will be clear if it's a fix, or a refactor, or ?. Typically it isn't just one of those things.

Making an opinionated absolute statement about something that's widely used and argued about isn't even logical. If nobody got any benefit, it wouldn't be a thing.

The CC standard may not be for everyone, but having some convention is often helpful. git log --pretty=oneline of structured format gives you broad filtering that's useful. Just writing like a human doesn't give you that ability and you're forced to read every line.

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