chore: add conventional commits template

[TheRealFalcon]

Proposed Commit Message

chore: add conventional commits template

We need to actually follow this if merged 😄

[holmanb]

I think the value of classifying commit types in terms of grokking history quickly (and maybe changelog automation or something) outweighs the process cost. +1

Lets leave open for more feedback.

[aciba90]

I totally agree, I think this adds value by itself in the short term and we could used tooling around conventional commits in the mid/long term to extract even more value. Thanks for bringing this dicussion up.

[blackboxsw]

I'd like to see us define an acceptable line LENGTH for titile/summary. I think it would be reasonable to set 72 as this width.

[TheRealFalcon]

Addressed in most recent force push

[blackboxsw]

Please do. I think now that we are allowing/performing more rebase commits instead squash-merged commits at PR-level granularity, we now represent a lot more commits which can be better categorized to assist with release content generation. While this may increase pressure on sensible commit title line-length of 72 in the title of a commit, I hope we can guide contributors to be creative and brief in our commit message titles to avoid exceeding this suggested limit.

[TheRealFalcon]

Given 2 +1s and another +1 to the idea with a change requested that has been addressed, I'm going to merge this. We can always iterate further if needed.

[holmanb]

@TheRealFalcon how do you feel about adding something to the docs about our commit message expectations? I'd like to be able to point a contributor to some guidance with a link when asking them to update commit messages.

[TheRealFalcon]

We had something in the docs originally, but I removed it. It was out of date compared to the actual template we were using, and I didn't see a strong reason to have it duplicated in both places.

What do you think about a more general "we use conventional commits" with a link to the official webpage and then a link back to our repo with the current template?

[holmanb]

@TheRealFalcon I already wrote up this issue to track this request before seeing your response, feel free to continue the conversation there.

I didn't see a strong reason to have it duplicated in both places.

Agreed, duplication feels weird, but when reviewing a PR I'd like to be able to drop a link to a header in our docs on RTD than have to point to the markdown template, which has lots of non-commit-format information to parse.

What do you think about a more general "we use conventional commits" with a link to the official webpage and then a link back to our repo with the current template?

That works for me. That doesn't cover the line length expectation, which I'd like to see documented too.