Hi guys, I like Discourse a lot and I appreciate having such awesome Open Source software available for free (ignoring the cost of hosting it myself). So I hope you guys don’t think that I’m bashing the great work you’re doing with this post. But I think there are some improvements which could be …

Did you check out the pinned Development topic? [image] Discourse GitHub commit prefix convention Development For those who want to bring changes to Discourse’s code, we require that each GitHub commit have one of the following prefixes: Prefix Defini…

Oh, sorry I missed the pinned topic. I can delete my topic since it seems to be redundant now. I just went by what I saw on Github… and only a handful of commit messages follow that convention, as far as I can see.

I’ll leave it up to @team to decide whether to delete, merge, or let this topic remain, as I do think you bring up a good point. While there is a convention in place, it isn’t used at all times by those who commit to the project, and I would agree that makes it much harder to follow when looking th…

The checkin prefix conventions are used – no idea what you two are on about. If the change is trivial, we don’t feel obligated to add a prefix. The prefix is for larger changes. For example, if I copyedit a single sentence changing it from The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog to The qu…

Hmmm… the thing is, let’s say I’m a Discourse admin. Going through all the commits is no fun. There should be a more professional-looking changelog somewhere, IMO. As a Discourse admin I’d like to be able to make an informed decision on updating and all the noise in the git log is not helping with…

Discourse is in very active development so the changelogs are going to be quite long. If you want something less granular than the resources that have already been pointed out, you might want to keep an eye on the #releases category.

Thanks @wesochuck for the great pointer! I have a follow-up question: what happens then with the point updates? Should I bother with them? Especially since their naming makes me a bit worried (“beta”).

You may want to consider switching to the stable branch . Note, I don’t think that it is possible to go from stable back to beta, so make sure this really what you want to do before proceeding.

Assuming security fixes are merged into stable as well, I think I’ll switch to stable.

They are. High security items are backported to stable, otherwise, it occurs every 3 months (roughly)

Better commit messages for the changelog

Development

wesochuck (Wes Osborn) February 5, 2016, 7:27pm 14

Confirmed that it looks like you need to wait till the stable release that would put you ahead of your current beta release:

Topic		Replies	Views
Discourse GitHub commit prefix convention Development	1	13221	January 10, 2026
Introducing releases.discourse.org Announcements	9	806	January 10, 2026
RFC: A new versioning strategy for Discourse Development dev-news	56	2286	March 30, 2026
Changelogs - running, betas, or otherwise? Support	9	833	June 1, 2021
Stable branch compatibility with discourse_docker and plugins Self-hosting stable	37	2703	February 3, 2024

Better commit messages for the changelog

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