support breaking changes without a longer description

[diminutivesloop]

Currently if I try to create a commit with breaking changes but without a longer description I get the following message: "A BREAKING CHANGE commit requires a body. Please enter a longer description of the commit itself:". According to the examples from the Conventional Commits spec commit messages where the body consists of only a breaking change are valid and should be supported by Commitizen.

[dmwelch]

Currently, the conventional commits specs require a description in the footer OR you must end your commit type with a "!" (https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0/#commit-message-with-to-draw-attention-to-breaking-change).

Can you provide an example that I can try to recreate? (Adaptor used, configuration, etc.). Thanks!

[travi]

what OP is referring to is an extra prompt in addition to the one that inserts the "BREAKING CHANGE: " section in the commit body. i usually leave that prompt blank since i would have added the longer description myself if i wanted it to be included. problem is that the extra prompt only shows up if you didnt already populate the longer description, so i often add my breaking change description there instead of the proper prompt that follows and end up having to restart

[diminutivesloop]

Here's an example:

 npx cz
cz-cli@4.2.1, cz-conventional-changelog@3.2.1

? Select the type of change that you're committing: feat:     A new feature
? What is the scope of this change (e.g. component or file name): (press enter to skip)
? Write a short, imperative tense description of the change (max 94 chars):
 (17) short description
? Provide a longer description of the change: (press enter to skip)

? Are there any breaking changes? Yes
? A BREAKING CHANGE commit requires a body. Please enter a longer description of the commit itself:
 long description
? Describe the breaking changes:
 breaking change description
? Does this change affect any open issues? No

And here's the resulting commit message:

feat: short description

BREAKING CHANGE: breaking change description

As you can see commitizen re-prompted for a commit body after I responded "Yes" to "Are there any breaking changes?" even though I skipped the earlier "Provide a longer description of the change" prompt. Now it did omit that longer description in the actual commit message as I would expect but the prompt is still unnecessary and could be misleading for newcomers to a project that uses commitizen.

[dmwelch]

Ah, I see now. I know it's not the best solution but if you are using cz-customizable you can set the configuration to have askForBreakingChangeFirst: true as a workaround.

I agree that this isn't the best solution, especially if you're using another adaptor... 🤔 I'd like to implement the fix here, but I'd be concerned about breaking adaptors that may not use the breakingChange question - I'm still fairly new to the project so I'll have to take a look at the internals when I have some time.

For the meanwhile, I'm adding the tag for "needs PR" and "bug" for now to mark this as "triaged" for the moment. I know this isn't ideal, but the Issues and PR lists are really long for the size of the projects and I'm working on pairing them down at the moment.

[diminutivesloop]

Ok no problem. The project I work on hasn't adopted commitizen-cli yet but I am planning to add it eventually.