Hi Jacopo, thanks for your effort in making the workflow more standard, natural and efficient.
+1 from my side on the proposal. I quickly skimmed through the CONTRIBUTING.md document and, overall, it looks good to me. I agree with Ashish that it would be worth mentioning somewhere the gradlew commands needed to test changes locally before making the PRs. I also noticed that there is no reference to the plugins folder, which is needed to make things work. Anahita Il giorno gio 28 mag 2026 alle ore 09:28 Jacopo Cappellato <[email protected]> ha scritto: > > Hi all, > > I would like to propose updating our contribution workflow and commit > message guidelines to simplify contributions and improve the quality of our > git history, pull requests, and release notes. > > Today, commit message guidelines are defined here: > https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBIZ/OFBiz+commit+message+template > and they are also the basis of our GitHub pull request template. The > broader contribution workflow is documented here: > https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBIZ/Contributing+via+Git+and+Github. > While useful, this document is quite long and includes a lot of generic git > information that is not specific to OFBiz. > > My main concern with the current commit message template is that it is very > OFBiz-specific and enforces a fixed format that does not always fit the > nature of the change. Instead, I would propose adopting a simpler and more > open format based on widely used git best practices: a commit message > should contain a title (imperative form, no trailing period) describing the > change and an optional description separated from the title by an empty > line. > > This approach is natural because it is already broadly adopted across many > open source communities and tooling ecosystems. I would also suggest > avoiding references to Jira tickets or external resources directly in > commit messages: our source code and commit history are long-term project > assets and should remain independent from external systems that may change > or disappear over time. > > The current commit message template could instead become the pull request > template. Pull requests are a more natural place for references to Jira > tickets, related pull requests, external resources, design discussions, > etc. The pull request title is also important because it can be used to > automatically generate release notes. > > Regarding release notes, I propose generating them automatically from pull > requests using GitHub tooling rather than Jira tooling. This makes pull > requests the primary entry point for contributions and their documentation, > instead of always requiring contributors to first create a Jira ticket. > When contributors already have working code to contribute, opening a pull > request and discussing details there is often more natural. > > Jira would still remain useful for bug reports without patches or when > contributors want to discuss ideas and designs before implementation. > > All the information about this workflow could be documented in the > CONTRIBUTING document already present in the repository and expanded to > describe the new process. This would allow contributors to immediately find > the guidelines directly in the repository instead of having to search > through Confluence documentation. A first draft of such document is already > available here: > > https://github.com/jacopoc/ofbiz-framework/blob/contributing/CONTRIBUTING.md > > In practice, the workflow would become: > > Current workflow: > > 1. > > Create a Jira ticket describing the change > 2. > > Create commits using the fixed format (including Jira references, > categories, etc.) > 3. > > Create a pull request (often repeating information already present > elsewhere) > > Proposed workflow: > > 1. > > Create one or more commits with a title and optional description using > the open format described above > 2. > > Submit a pull request using the pull request template (which we can > improve to provide better guidance) > 3. > > Optionally create a Jira ticket for bug reports or early design > discussions > > I would be interested in hearing feedback from the community. > > Jacopo
