CONTRIBUTING.md

How to contribute

This document will eventually outline all aspects of guidance to make your contributing experience a fruitful and enjoyable one. What it already contains is information about commit message formatting and how that directly affects the numerous automated processes that are used for this repo. It also covers how to contribute to this project documentation.

• How to contribute
  • Overview
  • Commit message formatting
    • Automation of multiple processes
    • Linting commit messages in CI
    • Relationship between commit type and version bump
      • Scopes
    • Use BREAKING CHANGE to trigger a major version change

Overview

Submitting a merge request is more than just code! To achieve a quality product, the tests and documentation need to be updated as well. An excellent merge request will include these in the changes, wherever relevant.

Commit message formatting

Since every type of change requires making Git commits, we will start by covering the importance of ensuring that all of your commit messages are in the correct format.

Automation of multiple processes

This project uses semantic-release for automating numerous processes such as bumping the version number appropriately, creating new tags/releases and updating the changelog. The entire process relies on the structure of commit messages to determine the version bump, which is then used for the rest of the automation.

Full details are available in the upstream docs regarding the Conventionnal Commit Message Conventions. The key factor is that the first line of the commit message must follow this format:

type(scope): subject

For example:

feat(libfoo): new API `foo.quux` deprecates `foo.bar`

We create the new API `foo.quux` to better do things and mark
`foo.bar` deprecated from version `1.3.4`.

* test/libfoo.t: test the new API `foo.quux`

* lib/foo.pl: new API `foo.quux` and mark `foo.bar` deprecated.

Besides the version bump, the changelog and release notes are formatted accordingly. So based on the example above:

Features

• libfoo: new API foo.quux deprecates foo.bar

• The type translates into a Features sub-heading.
• The (scope): will be shown in bold text without the brackets.
• The subject follows the scope as standard text.

Linting commit messages in CI

This project uses commitlint for checking commit messages during CI testing. This ensures that they are in accordance with the semantic-release settings.

For more details about the default settings, refer back to the commitlint reference rules.

Relationship between commit type and version bump