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The use of the word "chore" in many users of conventional commits has always riled me. I've always tended to favour the "linux kernel"[0] style of commit subjec
by dotwaffle 3mo ago
The use of the word "chore" in many users of conventional commits has always riled me. I've always tended to favour the "linux kernel"[0] style of commit subject, which thankfully gets a mention here.
[0] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v7.0/process/submitting-patches.html#the-canonical-patch-format https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v7.0/process/submitting-patc...
- jsve 3mo agoYou might enjoy Rich's take: https://richvdh.org/conventional-commits-considered-harmful.html#chore-is-a-problematic-term https://richvdh.org/conventional-commits-considered-harmful....
- embedding-shape 3mo agoRichard van der Hoff that is, not Rich Hickey which I first thought had published something new and opinionated again.
- layer8 3mo agoCompletely agree, the attitude implied by “chore” is very off-putting to me. As if the rest should all be marked “fun” or “indifferent”. That kind of emotional judgement doesn’t belong in a commit message.
- jasonjmcghee 3mo agoI don't personally see people write this message (though I'm sure they do) but dependabot and similar use it. So now I associate it an automated pr vs authored
- layer8 3mo agoI remember HN discussions pre-AI where people staunchly defended the use of that prefix.
- croemer 3mo agoI use chore quite a bit in my human written commit messages.
- jasonjmcghee 3mo agoDependabot was a thing before LLMs
- jonathanlydall 3mo agoI’ve never personally used the chore term, but it doesn’t bother me to see it and I don’t feel it has a negative connotation. Cleaning my kitchen after a meal may be a chore, but it’s not an intrinsically bad or unpleasant experience most of the time, it’s just good hygiene and afterwards I have the satisfaction of things being clean. Not cleaning the kitchen feels way worse to me as it ultimately leads to other far more unpleasant situations. Such it is with updating dependencies, it generally needs to be done, so it’s good to do it, but it’s in no way noteworthy, so chore describes it perfectly, to me it signals that: “it’s work that needed to be done, but not for a feature, functionality change or bug fix on this particular code base, so you’re unlikely to see much change”.
- gawa 3mo agoYou just made me realize why I've always considered 'chore' the most ambiguous type. In addition to being loosely defined ("transparent change with zero functionnal impact"?), this one is indeed a word related to emotion. No wonder it has a more subjective meaning than 'fix' or 'feat'. This is why I never use it and almost always pick 'feat' to please the linter. Because I can't help considering that any change worth committing is improving the quality of the code in one way or the other, and thus a feature.
- gdevillers 3mo agoI found an alternative word: "upkeep" Same idea without the pejorative aspect.
- williamdclt 3mo agoI wouldn't spend any sort of effort on this fight but that does seem quite a lot better
- julik 3mo agoIt is bad terminology, yes. But also - a pretense that you know the overarching influence of a commit ahead of time, which you don't - but once you have conventional commits everyone on the team and the LLMs have to spend time/tokens inventing that stupid nomenclature.