Change suggestion in CONTRIBUTING.md to avoid spam

[AThousandShips]

Having an issue tagged in a commit message spams the issue thread with notifications, which can be especially noisy when new contributors make a lot of updates or rebases.

The note serves little use in the commit message itself

Edit: for those who might not know what I'm talking about, here's one example

[fire]

I also agree that adding a notice so the pr description (not in the title, or the commit message) is unnecessary.

[akien-mga]

I'm not sure I agree. It's valuable information IMO to have the fixed issue mentioned in the commit message, so that you can go straight from a commit to the issue it's fixing. Additionally, the PR description is inferred from the commit message, so having the "Fixes #..." line in the body of the commit message ensures that it's also properly linked in the PR.

The spam on issues is honestly a GitHub bug they should fix. They could group multiple notifications together, or remove the ones originated from commits which have been garbage collected eventually because not merged.

But it's not a hill I'd die on, I see the downsides too when combined with our rebase/amend heavy workflow.

[AThousandShips]

Those are valid points, personally I find it not too long of a process to go from the commit to the PR and to the issue

But there's also the fact that the PR is often updated with more linked issues and it's usually not reflected in the commit message, so I think to make it useful to allow it we'd need to ensure contributors match up in their commits after such changes

[akien-mga]

I think we can remove the recommendation, but I wouldn't make it a policy to ask people to remove issue references from their commit messages, as this is common commit etiquette and adds unnecessary friction IMO.

[AThousandShips]

That sounds like a good balance to me

[akien-mga]

I think we can remove the recommendation, but I wouldn't make it a policy to ask people to remove issue references from their commit messages, as this is common commit etiquette and adds unnecessary friction IMO.

(Unless we notice that a contributor is rebasing their PR multiple times per day leading to a lot of spam - in this case I think it's fine to suggest they could remove the issue reference, at least until they're done with their draft.)

[akien-mga]

Thanks!

[AThousandShips]

Thank you!