Comment by brundozer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brundozer | Hacker News Reader

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I've always seen conventional commits as an anti-pattern as it seems to discourage developers from writing small, atomic commits.

I think that a commit should always be as small as possible and have a descriptive, meaningful message. It is therefore pretty common that I end up with tens of commits when working on a simple feature. Which of these commits should be labelled as "feat" when the feature is added by a group of commits rather than a specific one, and that none of them really adds any feature? Also, a bug can be fixed by many commits. Which of these commits should be labeled as "fix"? We can't label all of them as fixes as cherry-picking only one of them wouldn't fix anything, which means the commit message would be misleading. The only solution left is to create one commit per bug fix or per feature.

Moreover, this information can (and should) be carried by the branch name already, as you'd usually branch off from your main branch to either fix a bug or develop a new feature. All you have to do is to follow a naming convention for your branch like "feature/my-awesome-feature" or "bugfix/fix-this-annoying-bug".

The only benefit I see with using conventional commits is generating changelogs automatically from your git history.

Conventional Commits restricts each commit to a single type of change - no mixing bug fixes, features, and refactoring. This supports exactly what you want - small, atomic commits.

Why can't each small change be labeled "feat"? A feature does not need to be contained in a single change as a "big bang" commit. I make multiple "feat" changes to deliver a feature.

I follow trunk-based development[1], so branches are many, transient, and disposable (and sometimes not even present if it's a small change I'm pushing straight to `main`).

The advantage of Conventional Commits is that I can go to my trunk (`main`), and scroll through the list of commits and see their purpose at a glance:

    feat: ...
    feat: ...
    build: ...
    fix: ...
    feat: ...
    chore: ...

I can immediately tell which changes were related to fixing the build, or a bug, or supported feature development.

[1] https://trunkbaseddevelopment.com/

I nearly never look at individual commits in a PR.

I realize that this isn't applicable to all codebases, but when troubleshooting why a bug happens, or was intended to work, I find it a lot easier to look at a squashed commit than at the individual commits that went into a pull request. It does make `git bisect` less specific (and, to my shame, I've never used it), but having an overall commit message + pull request that points at a Jira ticket (or similar) helps identify whether something was intended behavior or not, and I've never felt the need to look deeper at whether part of it was a refactor/chore/feature. (If I had, I could look at the PR branch, presumably.)

In contrast, I've often had a stream of a 12-20 commits with tiny atomic (and often terrible) messages like "bugfix", "add test", "fix test", "fix linting", which I then try to rebase into some _coherent_ messaging of the time you espouse, where linting + typo fixes are rearranged and squashed on top of the commits that added them, and tests + features are added more closely together. It's very satisfying to do this, but in retrospect I've always felt like the time I spent doing that has been wasted --- it's hard, and often involves many iterations of conflict resolution when reordering commits, all for something that I or my team will squash anyway. The benefit gained (more readable commits of temporary value) never ever seems worth the time (Multiple hours) put into making them that way.

> I've always seen conventional commits as an anti-pattern as it seems to discourage developers from writing small, atomic commits.

Me too, actually I hate conventional commits with a pattern, because I have never seen a "conventional commit message" that actually does a good job. I've recently even written a short article on that subject (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29924976) because it is so annoying to me that people think writing a "conventional commit message" alone results in better quality (hint: it does not).

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