The motivation behind this change is to improve the productivity in the angular/angular repo
without sacrificing the original goal of having better understanding of changes within
the repo.
When the minBodyLength limit was originally introduced the goal was simple: force
committers to provide more contextual information for each change coming into the
repo. Too often we found ourselves in a situation where nobody understood what
motivated some of the changes and we needed more contextual info to know if the
change was correct, desirable, and still relevant (at a later point in time).
When the limit was introduced, we needed to pick a minimum body length - given no
data, and frustration with even big changes being committed with just a words in
the subject (along the lines of "fix(core): fixing a bug"), we overcompensated
and started off with a really high bar of minBodyLength set to 100 chars.
This turned out to be impractical and created a big friction point in making valid
changes in the angular/angular repo, and in fact caused some of the refactorings
and smaller changes to be either skipped or combined into other commits which
increased the burden for code reviewers.
The evidence in the friction points can be seen in the number of PRs that fail to pass
the current lint check on the first try, but more importantly also in the "creative"
writing that some of the committers are forced to resort to in order to satisfy the
current checks. Examples:
- 286fbf42c6
- b2816a1536
Given that we primarily care to document the motivation behind each change
(the answer to the ultimate question: WHY?), I've collected several *common* &
*valid* commit messages that are minimalistic and capture the WHY sufficiently:
```
Refactoring for readability. => 28 chars
Improving variable naming. => 26 chars
Additional test coverage. => 25 chars
Cleaning up the code. => 21 chars
Simplified the code. => 20 chars
```
These commit message bodies in addition to the commit message subject should
sufficiently satisfy the need to capture the context and motivation behind each
change without creating an undue burden on committers.
Example minimalistic commit message:
------
refactor(core): cleanup the expression parser
Simplifying the code.
----
Given this research, I'm decreasing the minBodyLenth in angular/angular to 20 chars.
The commit message quality can be additionally improved by implementing a commit message
template via `.gitmessage` that will guide the committers in following our commit message
guidelines via instructions provided in the form of in-the-flow help rather than as an after
the fact lint check.
More info: https://thoughtbot.com/blog/better-commit-messages-with-a-gitmessage-template
I'm intentionally deferring such change for a separate PR as not to complicate or delay the
minBodyLength limit decrease.
PR Close#37949
The logic to exclude certain types of commits (specifically 'docs' ones) was implemented in c5b125b7db. The ng-dev config was updated in the followup commit acf3cff9ee, but there was a typo that prevented the new logic from being activated. This commit updates the name of the config option in the ng-dev config to the right one (minBodyLengthTypeExcludes).
PR Close#37862
docs commits are sometimes trivial (e.g. an obvious typo fix) and in such cases its very
akward to to write up 100 chars worth of text about why this typo fix is the best thing in the
world and why it is so important and crucial that we must know why we are fixing the typo
at all. After all most typos are not just typos. Or are they? We'll shall see...
PR Close#37764
The shims_for_IE.js file contains vendor code that predates the third_party
directory. This file is currently used for internal karma testing setup. This
change corrects this by moving the shims_for_IE file to //third_part/
PR Close#37624
Leverage the caretaker note label configuration in ng-dev's merge
tooling to prompt the caretaker for confirmation when a PR has
the `PR action: merge-assistance` label. This should help to
surface for the caretaker, PRs which may need additional steps
taken, announcement messaging, etc.
PR Close#37675
Historically files to be formatted were added to a listing (via matchers)
to be included in formatting. Instead, this change begins efforts to
instead include all files in format enforcement, relying instead on an
opt out methodology.
PR Close#36940
This is a proposal commit that adds a separate scope for
migration changes. The motiviation is that migrations aren't
necessarily always affecting `@angular/core`, but are just
stored in the core package for a canonical location when
someone runs `ng update`. Additionally, it rather seems confusing in the
changelog if migration changes are listed under `core`.
PR Close#36390
Update the commit sha to require that PRs have been rebased beyond the one which has new header requirements so we don't get failures after merging
PR Close#37424
Updates the requiredBaseCommit for merging to patch branch to the
latest commit message validation fix found in the 10.0.x branch.
Previously, the patch branch commit used was for the 9.1.x branch.
PR Close#37316
Migrate to using .ng-dev directory for ng-dev configuration to allow
better management of the configuration using multiple files. The
intention is to prevent the config file from becoming unruly.
PR Close#37142
Igor Minar
Andrew Kushnir
Joey Perrott
Joey Perrott
Paul Gschwendtner
Andrew Scott