Use Conventional Commits

Status

Accepted.

Context

Commit messages in POLAR do not follow a common convention. This makes it hard to tell bugfixes and features apart, to recognize breaking changes, and to derive release notes from the repository history.

Decision

We use Conventional Commits for commit messages. The convention is enforced by commitlint in a commit-msg git hook.

Consequences

• (+) Changelogs can be generated from the commit history.
• (+) Breaking changes are documented clearly.
• (+) Bugfixes and features are clearly separated.
• (-) Multiple merge requests may be necessary to avoid mixing a bugfix and a feature if we would squash merge.