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Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things

sumnerevans.com

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Re: Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things

#73
post #68
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that if there was no release in between, or only a beta or similar, you now have two breaking changes indicated by the commits, although in sum there is none since the last official release.

That's true, but depends on your workflow and release strategy. If you are releasing upon every push to main/master (following what semantic release and conventional commits provides you in terms of automation), then it makes sense to perform major version bumps for the reverts. If you have a manual release strategy, then it might not make sense to use these tools in the way they have been designed.

If you have actual dependents in a SemVer fashion, then this isn’t useful for those still on the prior version. What you’d rather do is decrement the major version again because it’s compatible with the prior version again. Those dependents who already upgraded to the interim version have to consider another breaking change regardless.

And if you don’t have these kinds of dependents, then the versioning scheme isn’t important anyway.

Re: Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things

#74
post #65

The use of the word "chore" in many users of conventional commits has always riled me. I've always tended to favour the "linux kernel"[0] style of commit subject, which thankfully gets a mention here. [0] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v7.0/process/submitting-patc...

Completely agree, the attitude implied by “chore” is very off-putting to me. As if the rest should all be marked “fun” or “indifferent”. That kind of emotional judgement doesn’t belong in a commit message.

I don't personally see people write this message (though I'm sure they do) but dependabot and similar use it.

So now I associate it an automated pr vs authored

Re: Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things

#75
I'd much rather people think deeply about summarizing their work. This helps others understand it but, more importantly, helps the developer understand what they did. If its hard to summarize, maybe it should be tightened up a little for instance. Enforcing a "schema" might help a tiny bit but also can cause people to check out a little as it can feel like just another meaningless process.

Re: Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things

#76
post #66
post #30

There’s a much less awkward way to keep a change log: Keep a change log.

This is not without struggles. Many times the changelog updates are missed. You can try to catch this in code review, but that could also be missed. So you can try to automatically verify the changelog was updated, but you can't force that as a pass/fail check since not all changes require a user facing change. Or your project maintainers simply copy the commit message and paste it into the changelog, and at that poi…

> Many times the changelog updates are missed.

In my experience, LLMs are great at reviewing changelogs for potential gaps from a user POV (and even creating draft changelogs wholesale, if you're backfilling) based on git history.

Re: Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things

#77

I quite dislike this style of writing titles. "Stop something". I seems very popular. It sounds very commanding and "I am definitely right about this". Why not write "In favour of something" or "A case against something" or something like that?

Because you don't get attention if you don't write deliberately inflammatory content.

Re: Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things

#78
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree, the attitude implied by “chore” is very off-putting to me. As if the rest should all be marked “fun” or “indifferent”. That kind of emotional judgement doesn’t belong in a commit message.

I don't personally see people write this message (though I'm sure they do) but dependabot and similar use it. So now I associate it an automated pr vs authored

I remember HN discussions pre-AI where people staunchly defended the use of that prefix.

Re: Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things

#79

I quite dislike this style of writing titles. "Stop something". I seems very popular. It sounds very commanding and "I am definitely right about this". Why not write "In favour of something" or "A case against something" or something like that?

Our interest in a statement is piqued more when it challenges our worldview. It's impolite to a lot of people, but the attention economy rewards it.

Edit: Looks like they changed the title to be less provocative. Good for them

Re: Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things

#80

Odd. The main reason to use this style of commit message is for CI/CD automation. EDIT: I didn't see this covered in the article on my first pass. It is covered though. My apologies. The type of the commit informs the automated workflows how to handle the commit. This is why it comes first. For example, if you're performing CD, if you only commit a bunch of `fix: ` then only your semantic versioning patch version num…

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