Meta discussion: contributions, issues, commits

[jspenger]

Now is a good time to discuss contribution guidelines as we are ramping up the collaboration.

Any suggestions on the whole meta process of contributing, and anything that you think would be helpful, can be commented here. We will merge the ideas over time, and latest by the release we should have a good standard.

[jspenger]

• To ask for a re-review, then use the "Re-request Review" functionality in GitHub.
• Temporarily we will do the following: the PR creator will be the one to resolve conversations. We will revisit this practice at some point if there are issues.
• Issue labels: can remove the m: from issues.

[jspenger]

We should also discuss how to manage releases, tags, and branches, in this context.

[jspenger]

It was mentioned at some previous meeting about having PR templates and similar. This is probably a good idea, we should hash out a nice PR template for this.

[jspenger]

The current contributions state that "Group/squash commit, with a useful commit message (feat: ..., fix: ..., https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0/)." I have found that the commit messages feel awkward, and perhaps this is not something we need to explicitly say here. Instead, we should have informative commit messages, the form is perhaps not necessary. This is to discuss.

• Should we remove the requirement on commit messages to be of the "conventionalcommits" form?

[aversey]

Should we remove the requirement on commit messages to be of the "conventionalcommits" form?

It's the first time I have heard about this commit format, but it looks good to me. I think the only problem with it is that while we are in 0.x.x, almost all commits contain breaking changes, so we have to have ! in a lot of commits. =)

I think it is okay to require following this, as actually the only thing it requires is fix/feat (maybe with scope and !) in the header. I think it would make sense to include this header prefix in issues also, so that a contributor will not have to think about this.

The other question about this is whether we should add other commit types. It possibly is a little strange to have only fix-commits for docs, although I am okay with this as long as the rules are made clear for contributors (and it seems that an important part of conventional commits is compliance with semver and automatic processing, so it makes sense not to use non-standard commit types).

[jspenger]

Personally, I have come to dislike the "conventionalcommits" form. I found it difficult to choose the correct prefix, to the point that it made the commits worse over all, as the prefix would be not suitable. At this point, I am not sure if it is a question to me, if we should use it, but rather, what it should be replaced with.