Hi all, I'm obviously +1 on Robert's proposals. Should we modify our CONTRIBUTING.md guidelines?
Also, in the spirit of standardizing how commit messages should be formatted, I suggest that we take a look at the Conventional Commits spec [1]. This small spec is becoming more and more popular (I already see some contributors applying it to Polaris PRs – see this one [2] for example). The big advantage of having a standardized commit format is that tools & plugins would be able to extract more meaningful information from commits, in order, for example, to generate a curated changelog split in sections, while avoiding common noise, such as commits marked as "chore" or generated by bots. [1]: https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0/ [2]: https://github.com/apache/polaris/pull/1614 Thanks, Alex On Mon, May 19, 2025 at 6:09 PM William Hyun <will...@apache.org> wrote: > > +1 on this suggestion, it would be good practice for everyone. > > Bests, > William > > On Mon, May 19, 2025 at 7:56 AM Prashant Singh > <prashant.si...@snowflake.com.invalid> wrote: > > > +1 to the suggestion ! > > > > On Mon, May 19, 2025 at 7:39 AM Dmitri Bourlatchkov <di...@apache.org> > > wrote: > > > > > Great suggestions, Robert! Thanks for writing them down. > > > > > > Cheers, > > > Dmitri. > > > > > > On Mon, May 19, 2025 at 8:34 AM Robert Stupp <sn...@snazy.de> wrote: > > > > > > > Hi all, > > > > > > > > Looking a bit ahead with respect to releases and (semi) automatic > > > releases: > > > > > > > > We have a script that automatically collects the code changes from the > > > > Git log and adds it to the release-notes. While PRs usually have some > > > > meaningful information in the description, that information is often > > > > lost in the merged commits. > > > > > > > > The Polaris project uses the GitHub default to populate the commit > > > > message for the "squash and merge" option from the messages of all > > > > commits in the PR. > > > > > > > > The easiest way to get the "meaningful" information from the PR > > > > description into the Github-proposed message is to have that in the > > > > branch for the PR - if that branch has only one commit. In other words: > > > > when you open a PR and have only one commit in the PR branch, that > > > > commit's subject and message are used to populate the PR summary + > > > > description. > > > > > > > > For the (generated) release-notes and the Git commit log in general > > > > having the actual description of the changes is very valuable. > > > > > > > > Please take the time _before_ hitting "squash and merge" and check & > > > > update the subject and message fields. It's not much work but brings a > > > > lot of value later. Remove the irrelevant messages from the > > > > "intermediate commits" (like "test fix" or "make it compile") and help > > > > people who later look at the Git log by having the relevant parts of > > the > > > > PR summary+description included in the merged commit. > > > > > > > > For "release managers" it's probably quite a lot of unnecessary work to > > > > do this in hindsight and inspect every PR. > > > > > > > > Robert > > > > > > > > -- > > > > Robert Stupp > > > > @snazy > > > > > > > > > > > > >
