Renovate should not convert commit- and pr-titles to lowercase

[kingcrunch]

Type of discussion.

I'm proposing an idea

Tell us more.

Does it makes sense to change the case of the title when semantic-commits-mode is enabled?

While reading the commits, issues, PRs, and so on I thought, that this is really specified somewhere, but now I've read the Conventional commits spec and found out, that it is not mentioned there.

Than I found, that only Angular defined this rule. Renovate is used by many projects, even outside the Node/JS/Typescript/... ecosystem, where such rules are unknown in general and at first confusing, because (as mentioned) conventional commits doesn't mention anything like that.

On the other hand, if one likes to have lowercase first character, it is just the commitMessageAction, which needs a change from "Update" to "update". At least, when there no other, deeper configuration changes I don't see yet :) And even if, I cannot imagine, that is is impossible to setup oneself.

My suggestion:

• Do not change the case of the PR- and commit-title at all and
• Change the default of commitMessageAction to update (maybe for semantic commits only, but actually I don't know, why to differ)

What do you think?

[rarkins]

I'm ok with this idea, but a couple of concerns:

1. I think right now we "detect" angular, not conventional. I'm not sure if we need to enhance our detection capabilities
2. Update is probably not the only commitMessageAction affected, but maybe we could solve all of them in a preset

[kingcrunch]

I started with a simple PR

Regarding:

1. We enable semanticCommit manually, so the detection algorithm doesn't affect us. I'll look after that, if I find it ;)
2. I meant, Update is the default value. Are there places, were it gets overwritten? Presets probably/maybe?

[rarkins]

https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Arenovatebot%2Frenovate%20commitMessageAction&type=code

And specifically:

[rarkins]

@kingcrunch Let's discuss requirements here again rather than in an active PR.

We have a way of detecting semantic commits, but we don't differentiate between angular and "conventional".

The angular spec says:

<type>(<scope>): <short summary>
  │       │             │
  │       │             └─⫸ Summary in present tense. Not capitalized. No period at the end.
  │       │
  │       └─⫸ Commit Scope: animations|bazel|benchpress|common|compiler|compiler-cli|core|
  │                          elements|forms|http|language-service|localize|platform-browser|
  │                          platform-browser-dynamic|platform-server|router|service-worker|
  │                          upgrade|zone.js|packaging|changelog|docs-infra|migrations|
  │                          devtools
  │
  └─⫸ Commit Type: build|ci|docs|feat|fix|perf|refactor|test

In other words, the full commit message should be lowercased.

Conventional commits says:

Apart from this, it is the only reference I see to terms like "capitalized", "upper" or "lower" cased except for BREAKING CHANGES.

What this says to me is that:

• if angular, lower case the whole thing
• if conventional, don't lower case anything that's not already

Let's say we remove all commit message lower casing, probably in a major release to flag it's a breaking change. In this case probably most people are happy or disinterested, but we also should have a way to allow angular convention users to do what they need (hello @devversion).

I'm pretty sure we don't need to be "angular convention aware" if the only thing is lower casing. We do have a lowercase template helper already but not sure if that's flexible enough to do the whole commit message. I suspect it doesn't work as needed when the message itself is already a template.

So then a quick solution would be a new option commitMessageLowerCase which defaults to false, and angular convention users can set it to true? @kingcrunch @devversion would this satisfy both your use cases? @kingcrunch would need to do nothing on the next major release while @devversion would need to add this setting as part of the upgrade.

One more thing: we'd need to think about both of these:

• If we are looking for pre-existing closed (ignored) PRs, we should compare them case-insensitive
• If deciding if an open PR already exists for a branch, we should match it case-insensitive but detect and update it if the casing has changed

[devversion]

Hey all, I haven't read through all discussion here, but from an Angular perspective, it's only important that the first letter after the commit scope is not capitalized.

e.g. feat(bla): This is wrong, changing EventEmitter, while feat(bla): this is ok, changing EventEmitter.

Generally I've been captializing words/symbols in the "short summary" as needed, when it corresponds to an actual known export or similar. Lower casing the full commit message is not strictly necessary. I don't know what Renovate currently does- but we are also not necessarily bothering a lot I think.

[kingcrunch]

I've updated the branch with the suggestions, but now I realize, that github doesn't update the PR now that it is closed

https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate/pull/20930/files

Changes are here

https://github.com/KingCrunch/renovate/tree/fix/do-not-lowercase-entire-commit-title

[viceice]

I am not sure, if a decision was made.
I've updated the PR-branch with what I think covers the suggestions from @rarkins, the PR is still closed though.

please reopen the PR now

[kingcrunch]

@rarkins Can you please reopen the PR?

[kingcrunch]

I guess the breaking-flag is also not needed anymore now

[kingcrunch]

This would be a bad idea, we should not do it

Could you maybe explain, why?

To clarify: My suggestion only covers changes in commitMessageActions. What you cited is just, what happens in case of semanticCommits=false. The changes would only cover default values, which everybody can revert (manually via options, or presets). There is no logic, that suddenly changes the case of characters anywhere. That is something I try to avoid/reduce, because right now there is some undocumented magic, that makes everything lowercase.

To summarize:

• Remove every "make things magically lowercase"
• Just set commitMessageAction to first letter lowercase

Thats it.

Now I dont't understand, why this is worse, than an yet-another-option, that leads to at the end 2 new "conventions" (normal, lowercase-normal, semantic/conventional, lowercase-semantic/"angular").

PS: Don't get me wrong. I just don't get it. If you prefer the extra option, fine. :)

[rarkins]

Your suggestion would make millions of future PRs worse by default (missing capitalization). It's a bad user experience if everybody who doesn't use semantic commits has to then change their config to undo this worse behavior. It's important that we have empathy for the users it would affect.

[rarkins]

Here's a quick possibility:

New config option commitMessageLowerCase which defaults to "auto" and has same behavior as today (so that it's backwards compatible).

Also has second option "never" which can be configured to disable lowercasing for @kingcrunch.

In a future major release we can:

• Add another option "first" which lower cases the first letter only, for Angular usage, and
• Change "auto" behavior to be same as "never"

[kingcrunch]

@rarkins

Is this your last decision? Because you mentioned another solution, which I implemented (or at least I tried to, because first-time-typescripter as mentioned).

I just want to to get this fixed some day...

and we really need this fix, because right now this bug prevents automerging from working properly.

[rarkins]

Yes, what I suggested today would allow it to be fixed now, without requiring an immediate major release, and gives us more flexibility in future than true/false

[kingcrunch]

OK, thanks :)

I've updated the branch
https://github.com/KingCrunch/renovate/tree/fix/do-not-lowercase-entire-commit-title