commit message titles and changelog entries

Lubomir I. Ivanov neolit123 at gmail.com
Fri Feb 2 13:59:30 PST 2018


hello,

1)

this suggestion is triggered by the need for streamlining the addition
of changelog entries by contributors in the CHANGELOG.md file.

right now, we merge PRs that make an important change, but such PRs do
not append a change in the CHANGELOG.md file. adding notes in
CHANGELOG.md has to be made a requirement in PRs, otherwise before a
release one has to go over the usually big list of commits and find
relevant missing entries.

by doing that we also need a standardized CHANGELOG.md entry format.

my suggestion is the following:
    - Area: change that was made (#github-link)

examples:
- Planner: fixed a bug when moving data points (#32132)
- Mobile: fixed a bug when clicking button X. The bug also affected
  menu X (#32132)

notes about the format:
- the area name is uppercase
- lowecase after the "Area: ", should it be uppercase here?
- no period at the end of an entry only in-between sentences
- when there is a related issue a (#github-link) has to be added at the end
- first line stats with "- " and no indentation. the next lines are
indented by "  ".

example areas:
- Planner
- Mobile
- Desktop
- Bluetooth
- Map-widget
- Cloud-storage
- Uemis
- Import
- Export
- Profile
- Libdivecomputer

opinions about this?

2)

for commit messages-  until now we have accepted commit messages that
do not specify an area, like these:
   Fix bug when clicking button X
   Small whitespace fix

these are kind of vague, thus i would suggest requiring (perhaps not
strictly) an area prefix or a filename, like so:
   Divelist: Fix bug when clicking button X
   divelist.cpp: fix whitespace

any opinions about this too?

thanks
lubomir
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