If you are releasing upon every push to main/master (following what semantic release and conventional commits provides you in terms of automation), then it makes sense to perform major version bumps for the reverts.
If you have a manual release strategy, then it might not make sense to use these tools in the way they have been designed.
And if you don’t have these kinds of dependents, then the versioning scheme isn’t important anyway.
I think that could be simplified, so the tool can tell that a commit is reverting a breaking change and thus the version should be decremented, but at least there's an escape hatch.
Why on Earth are people not writing commit messages for their reverts? They should have semantic commit messages just the same as any other commit.
Unless the point is that they're not following per-commit CD, and if you commit then revert that commit before a release was made. That sounds like a process failure. Which of course, process isn't infallible, and neither is the automated version management. If you screw up, use an escape hatch — just like reverting a commit that had previously gone through code review and been merged.
Re: change log generation. The article says change logs shouldn't have commit messages. I agree. Many tools (e.g. Changesets https://github.com/changesets/changesets) use the semantic commit type to sort change log entries, but require you to write those user facing change log entries separately.
Lately I use CalVer instead of SemVer, so it hasn't been an issue. I like the idea of smart auto-bump for versions.
When I encounter a bug in a dependency of mine. Before I worry about submitting a PR, the very first thing I do is grab my version number and check the commit logs for fixes since my version number.
If I'm trying to decide whether I should bother upgrading, I scan the log for new features.
It's the title, not the details. The commit message body should contain MUCH more detail than the title.
If you don't like it because it looks ugly. Sure, that's subjective. And actually, I agree. Because it's standardized though, Git interfaces could even be configured to trim this off and provide different visual styles for the different kinds of commits. The types could be used as search filters too etc.
Now, I get people don't like the look of them. Neither did I when I first saw them. Then I started using them and found them useful.
It's fine, people have different preferences, it's just a convention and it's not going to work for every project. The article itself just doesn't seem to hold any water.
If I'm at the point of contributing a PR to a dependency, I've already identified the root cause in detail. There's no way a change log should be going into that level of detail, or else you're just duplicating the Git log for no reason.
Will the change log make mention of fixing the bug? Perhaps. But I'm going to want to read the technical details of the fix to make sure they've specifically addressed my issue, and not just a similar problem. What is the performance impact of the fix? Are there security implications they've explained in the commit message.
I'm a software engineer, not an end user, I want the technical details of my dependencies.