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Commit Message Format Policy

[TOC]

Commit messages should begin with a brief subject line. Try to limit this to no more than 72 characters. The body of the message should be separated from the subject line by a blank line and wrapped at 72 characters. The body of a commit message should explain what the commit does and why. Do not explain how the changes work as the code itself should do that.

Linking a commit to an issue

If your commit fixes an issue that has been reported in the issue tracker, add a line indicating the fixed issue number to your commit message. In such case, Gitlab will automatically close the issue and add a link to your commit in the issue.

For example, the following line will automatically close issue #1234567:

Fixes https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/issues/1234567

There is an alias to simplify this step. You can read more about automatic issue closing in the Gitlab documentation.

Changelog tags

To facilitate following the code changes, you should include a changelog tag to indicate modifications noticeable by the users. There are three types of changelog tags:

ADDED to denote a new feature
CHANGED to indicate a modification of an existing feature
REMOVED to inform about removal of an existing feature

There is no need to add changelog tags for commits that do not modify the way the users interact with the software, such as code refactoring or a bugfix for unexpected behavior. The main purpose of the changelog tags is to generate the release notes and notify the documentation maintainers about changes. Keep that in mind when deciding whether to add a changelog tag.

Making the Documentation Developers Aware of Changes

When a commit with changelog tag is pushed, the committer should create a new issue in the documentation repository to notify the documentation maintainers. You should include a link to the commit containing the reported changes.

Extracting changelog

Thanks to the changelog tags, it is easy to extract the changelog using git commands:

git log -E --grep="ADD[ED]?:|REMOVE[D]?:|CHANGE[D]?:" --since="1 Jan 2017"
git log -E --grep="ADD[ED]?:|REMOVE[D]?:|CHANGE[D]?:" <commit hash>

KiCad provides an alias to shorten the changelog extraction commands.

Example

Following is an example of a properly formatted commit message:

Eeschema: Adding line styling options

ADDED: Add support in Eeschema for changing the default line style,
width and color on a case-by-case basis.

CHANGED: "Wire" lines now optionally include data on the line style,
width and color if they differ from the default.

Fixes https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/issues/594059
Fixes https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/issues/1405026

Git aliases file

There is a file containing helpful git aliases located at helpers/git/fixes_alias. To install it, run in the source repository:

git config --add include.path $(pwd)/helpers/git/fixes_alias

'fixes' alias

Once the alias configuration file is installed, it may be used to amend the most recent commit to include the bug report link:

git fixes 1234567

For example, the command below will append a line to the last commit message:

Fixes https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/issues/1234567

'changelog' alias

With the alias configuration file installed, you get an alias to extract the changelog:

git changelog --since="1 Jan 2017"
git changelog <commit hash>

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