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

This project applies some customisation to the defaults, as outlined in the table below, based upon the type of the commit:

Type	Heading	Description	Bump (default)	Bump (custom)
build	Build System	Changes related to the build system	–	_
chore	–	Changes to the build process or auxiliary tools and libraries such as documentation generation	–	_
ci	Continuous Integration	Changes to the continuous integration configuration	–	_
docs	Documentation	Documentation only changes	–	0.0.1
feat	Features	A new feature	0.1.0	0.1.0
fix	Bug Fixes	A bug fix	0.0.1	0.0.1
perf	Performance Improvements	A code change that improves performance	0.0.1	0.0.1
refactor	Code Refactoring	A code change that neither fixes a bug nor adds a feature	–	0.0.1
revert	Reverts	A commit used to revert a previous commit	–	0.0.1
style	Styles	Changes that do not affect the meaning of the code (white-space, formatting, missing semi-colons, etc.)	–	0.0.1
test	Tests	Adding missing or correcting existing tests	–	0.0.1

Scopes

Even if it is possible to limit the possible scopes like in Angular, this project does not enforce them and let the contributors define meaningful ones in their commits.

Use BREAKING CHANGE to trigger a major version change

Adding BREAKING CHANGE to the footer of the extended description of the commit message will always trigger a major version change, no matter which type has been used. This will be appended to the changelog and release notes as well. To preserve good formatting of these notes, the following format is prescribed:

BREAKING CHANGE: <explanation in paragraph format>.

An example of that:

feat(api): remove the API deprecated before 1.4.0

To make the project maintainable, we need to cleanup some deprecated
API.

The API deprecated after 1.4.0 are not concerned by this cleanup.

BREAKING CHANGE: the old API `foo.bar` was deprecated since version 1.3.4 and is
removed now.

BREAKING CHANGE: the old API `foo.baz` was deprecated since version 1.2.6 and is
removed now.