For KWin we think about a message guideline because our current best practice that we got used to over time is just sometimes putting tags in square brackets at the beginning of the subject line for indicating the location of the change in code but somebody noted having a square bracket in the beginning leads to problems with certain git log parser tools.
Asking around on IRC it seems we should expand the scope. Apparently also other KDE projects could profit from a policy and some tooling around it. We currently have the Phabricator commit message formatting through arc, but this doesn't expand to the important subject line and it will go away soon anyway with our move to GitLab. After looking around a bit what I found to be very interesting was the Conventional Commits specification[1]. It is based on the AngularJS commit message policy, which is imo a very well formulated policy. Besides the policy they offer also several tools to check own commits and to be integrated into a CI system: there is commitlint[2] to check commits on obeying the policy and conventional-changelog[3] to create changelog documents automatically from these commits. For example looking at the latest changelog of Frameworks[4] in the long list of commits there is no differentiation between fixes, features and other work. Also sometimes there are tags, sometimes not, and if there are sometimes they are in square brackets, sometimes with colons. In contrast a changelog generated from commits following the conventional commits specification can be easily sorted and reformatted. An example for that is Angular's changelog[5]. What do you think about such a guideline? Would an admin be interested in putting these tools onto a test instance? I know admins currently have much to do with GitLab transition though, so I write this message also as a reminder to myself to pick it up again afterwards if there is no time right now. [1] https://www.conventionalcommits.org [2] https://commitlint.js.org [3] https://github.com/conventional-changelog/conventional-changelog [4] https://kde.org/announcements/kde-frameworks-5.61.0.php [5] https://github.com/angular/angular/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md
