I hate Conventional Commits — musicmatzes blog

I am co-maintaining a few crates in the Rust ecosystem. Some very passively, some (config-rs) more actively. From time to time, and lately more frequently, I see more and more “conventional commits”. I hate them with a passion and for the repositories I frequently ask people to rewrite their commit message. I even went as far as picking their commits to my local repository and rewriting the commit messages by hand (yes, FOR THEM even though it is not my job).

The idea behind conventional commits is that one can write tools to parse commit messages and process the found data, for example to generate changelogs. Other uses come to mind, for example for gathering statistics (“who writes the most 'feature' commits?”).

First of all, commit messages are there for developers of a software to understand why you did what to achive what goal (see also: 1, 2, 3). Generating changelogs from commits results in not very much more than git shortlog lastrelease..currentrelease. Changelogs are mainly for the users of the software. These users might be developers, if the project is a library, but the point stands. A user of a software should never have to concern themselves with stuff that happened during the development of the next release of that software. They are concerned about what changed for them. These things might overlap, yes, but they are never equal!

From the real world out there – from maintaining a few software projects – I can tell you this: Not ONE SINGLE conventional commit message I've seen in recent years did actually a good job. None, yes I say it again: NONE, has actually described what the commit was about!

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