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Completely agree, the attitude implied by “chore” is very off-putting to me. As if the rest should all be marked “fun” or “indifferent”. That kind of emotional judgement doesn’t belong in a commit message.
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I’ve never personally used the chore term, but it doesn’t bother me to see it and I don’t feel it has a negative connotation.

Cleaning my kitchen after a meal may be a chore, but it’s not an intrinsically bad or unpleasant experience most of the time, it’s just good hygiene and afterwards I have the satisfaction of things being clean. Not cleaning the kitchen feels way worse to me as it ultimately leads to other far more unpleasant situations.

Such it is with updating dependencies, it generally needs to be done, so it’s good to do it, but it’s in no way noteworthy, so chore describes it perfectly, to me it signals that: “it’s work that needed to be done, but not for a feature, functionality change or bug fix on this particular code base, so you’re unlikely to see much change”.

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I don't personally see people write this message (though I'm sure they do) but dependabot and similar use it.

So now I associate it an automated pr vs authored

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I remember HN discussions pre-AI where people staunchly defended the use of that prefix.
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I use chore quite a bit in my human written commit messages.
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I found an alternative word: "upkeep"

Same idea without the pejorative aspect.

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I wouldn't spend any sort of effort on this fight but that does seem quite a lot better
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Richard van der Hoff that is, not Rich Hickey which I first thought had published something new and opinionated again.
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It is bad terminology, yes. But also - a pretense that you know the overarching influence of a commit ahead of time, which you don't - but once you have conventional commits everyone on the team and the LLMs have to spend time/tokens inventing that stupid nomenclature.
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