Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

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I have always been extremely peculiar about commit messages and IMO the commitizen stuff (aka "semantic commits") is one of those things which is only useful if you personally find it useful and you are the only one working on your project.

I have never seen it work in a team of 2+. People mix up what each prefix means. Hell, I've seen someone "use" it but only ever use "feat:" even for typo fixes. I ended up rewriting his entire git history to strip all "feat:" instances from the commit message since they were just noise.

Basically the only time I've seen it work is when all the following is true:

- You're on a solo project

- You commit a lot

- You're very consistent with your prefixing

- You want to use those prefixes to generate changelogs.

… then it's useful. Otherwise, it's noise.

I disagree, we've been using it with friends of mine and I enjoy it. The main reason is so that's it's easier to generate a changelog as we're following the Angular commit guideline. I would consider Angular a successful project and this is their git history: https://github.com/angular/angular/commits/master

I mean, I've seen it used by larger teams as well. For example Sentry uses it. I've also had feedback from several devs using it in such teams that the whole thing was "bureaucratic bullshit".

That said if you and your friends are happy users of it, I'm glad. I suspect that if you have a small team that knows each other well enough, that is a bit of an extension of a one-person project and it can still remain. I personally have seen the system crumble enough times with even one single user, not to trust it in the hands of two at once.

> I suspect that if you have a small team that knows each other well enough, that is a bit of an extension of a one-person project and it can still remain.

Well yeah that's exactly this. Tough I've got to admit that it doesn't work that well as we'd like regarding external pull requests since contributors do not all read our commit guidelines.

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