chore: expand imperative verb whitelist and improve validation logic by shenxianpeng · Pull Request #527 · commit-check/commit-check

shenxianpeng · 2026-08-05T09:04:08Z

Summary

Extended the imperative verb whitelist in commit_check/imperatives.py with 100+ additional verbs and added comprehensive test coverage to ensure correct imperative forms are not rejected while maintaining validation of incorrect verb forms.

Key Changes

Expanded IMPERATIVES set: Added 100+ new imperative verbs including:
- Common verbs previously missing: be, do, die, let, work, teach, treat
- British English spellings (e.g., normalise, prioritise, serialise) alongside American variants
- Technical/domain-specific verbs: deduplicate, hoist, inline, paginate, shard, stub, subclass
- Alphabetically sorted the complete list for maintainability
Updated documentation: Clarified the philosophy in comments:
- Explained why both -ize and -ise spellings are included
- Noted that gaps in the whitelist are bugs in the file, not author mistakes
- Emphasized that false negatives (rejecting correct subjects) are worse than false positives
Added test coverage:
- New test_correct_imperative_subjects_are_not_rejected() test with 12 real-world examples that were previously rejected
- New test_wrong_verb_forms_still_fail() test to ensure the validation still catches actual errors (past tense, gerunds, etc.)
- Tests document the expected behavior and prevent regression

Implementation Details

The changes maintain backward compatibility while significantly improving the validator's accuracy. The expanded list now covers most common imperative verbs encountered in commit messages, reducing false rejections while the new tests ensure the rule still catches genuinely incorrect verb forms.

https://claude.ai/code/session_01U9zFxq8V4qxG4aMzJhGBFn

Summary by CodeRabbit

Enhancements
- Expanded accepted imperative verbs in commit subject validation.
- Added support for both British “-ise” and American “-ize” spellings.
- Improved handling of valid imperative subjects while continuing to reject incorrect verb forms.
Tests
- Added coverage for new verbs, spelling variants, and regression cases.

CC003 matches the subject's first word against a fixed list, so a verb missing from it rejects a subject that was written correctly. The contributor then has to reword something that was never wrong, and the only way to learn which words are acceptable is trial and error. Measured against 40,000 git.git subjects — a project that writes strictly imperative subjects, with its area prefixes stripped so only the verb is compared — the list rejected 17.9% of them. This brings that to 10.5%. The additions come from that corpus, filtered by hand to unambiguous verbs: avoid, clarify, teach, factor, free, mention, plug, inline, restore, retire, treat, tighten and the rest. Adverb-led subjects ("always quote the path") and non-verbs were left out — the first are correct English the list cannot represent, and the second would weaken the check. Both spellings of every -ize/-ise verb are now present. The file had sixteen -ize verbs and four -ise ones, so a project writing British English was being told "normalise" is not imperative. Wrong forms still fail, which is the property that matters: "updated the parser", "adding a new flag", "fixes the crash" and "removed the dead code" are covered by a test alongside the recovered words. The remaining 10.5% is the point of the follow-up issue: a list can only ever approximate "is this an English imperative verb". Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01U9zFxq8V4qxG4aMzJhGBFn

coderabbitai · 2026-08-05T09:04:26Z

📝 Walkthrough

Walkthrough

Changes

Imperative subject validation

Layer / File(s)	Summary
Expand imperative vocabulary `commit_check/imperatives.py`	The `IMPERATIVES` constant adds many imperative verbs and British and American spelling variants.
Validate imperative subjects `tests/engine_test.py`	Tests accept the added forms and reject past-tense, gerund, and third-person forms.

Estimated code review effort: 2 (Simple) | ~10 minutes

Possibly related issues

commit-check/commit-check#526 — The vocabulary expansion addresses missing imperative verbs and spelling variants.

Possibly related PRs

commit-check/commit-check#371 — Both PRs expand IMPERATIVES.
commit-check/commit-check#496 — Both PRs update the allow-list and SubjectImperativeValidator tests.
commit-check/commit-check#498 — Both PRs add imperative verbs and corresponding tests.

Suggested labels: enhancement, tests

Suggested reviewers: lntutor

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 5

✅ Passed checks (5 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Docstring Coverage	✅ Passed	No functions found in the changed files to evaluate docstring coverage. Skipping docstring coverage check.
Linked Issues check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Out of Scope Changes check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Description Check	✅ Passed	Check skipped - CodeRabbit’s high-level summary is enabled.
Title check	✅ Passed	The title clearly summarizes the whitelist expansion and related validation coverage in the pull request.

✨ Finishing Touches

📝 Generate docstrings

Create stacked PR
Commit on current branch

🧪 Generate unit tests (beta)

Create PR with unit tests
Commit unit tests in branch claude/refresh-sample-output-602anc

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_{Comment @coderabbitai help to get the list of available commands.}

They assert which subjects are accepted, not how fast the check runs, and marking them adds twelve identical-cost cases to what CodSpeed measures. The companion test for wrong verb forms was already unmarked, so the pair was inconsistent as well. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01U9zFxq8V4qxG4aMzJhGBFn

coderabbitai

🧹 Nitpick comments (1)

tests/engine_test.py (1)
1356-1371: 📐 Maintainability & Code Quality | 🔵 Trivial | ⚡ Quick win

Exercise a newly added spelling pair in this test.

serialise already exists in commit_check/imperatives.py at Lines 439-440. This case does not verify the vocabulary expansion. The test also does not cover both spellings of a newly added -ise/-ize pair. Replace it with customise and customize, added at Lines 98-99.
Suggested test update
-            "refactor: serialise the payload",
+            "refactor: customise the payload",
+            "refactor: customize the payload",
🤖 Prompt for AI Agents
Verify each finding against current code. Fix only still-valid issues, skip the
rest with a brief reason, keep changes minimal, and validate.

In `@tests/engine_test.py` around lines 1356 - 1371, Update the imperative-message
test cases by replacing the existing “serialise” entry with both “customise” and
“customize,” using the corresponding imperative phrases. Keep the cases in the
rejected-message list and preserve the existing spelling-pair coverage intent.

🤖 Prompt for all review comments with AI agents

Verify each finding against current code. Fix only still-valid issues, skip the
rest with a brief reason, keep changes minimal, and validate.

Nitpick comments:
In `@tests/engine_test.py`:
- Around line 1356-1371: Update the imperative-message test cases by replacing
the existing “serialise” entry with both “customise” and “customize,” using the
corresponding imperative phrases. Keep the cases in the rejected-message list
and preserve the existing spelling-pair coverage intent.

ℹ️ Review info

⚙️ Run configuration

Configuration used: defaults

Review profile: CHILL

Plan: Pro Plus

Run ID: 34687327-1676-4f7e-9650-f2418781a3f6

📥 Commits

Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between 3ba4f08 and 7239ac8.

📒 Files selected for processing (2)

commit_check/imperatives.py
tests/engine_test.py

codecov · 2026-08-05T09:08:58Z

Codecov Report

✅ All modified and coverable lines are covered by tests.
✅ Project coverage is 97.68%. Comparing base (5c39e5f) to head (5289553).
⚠️ Report is 3 commits behind head on main.

Additional details and impacted files

@@            Coverage Diff             @@
##             main     #527      +/-   ##
==========================================
+ Coverage   97.40%   97.68%   +0.28%     
==========================================
  Files          12       12              
  Lines        1231     1254      +23     
==========================================
+ Hits         1199     1225      +26     
+ Misses         32       29       -3

☔ View full report in Codecov by Harness.
📢 Have feedback on the report? Share it here.

🚀 New features to boost your workflow:

❄️ Test Analytics: Detect flaky tests, report on failures, and find test suite problems.

The British-spelling case used serialise, which the file already contained before this change, so it proved nothing about the addition. customise is the useful one: customize was listed and customise was not, which is exactly the half-a-pair bug the sweep was meant to close. Both spellings are now asserted. Reported by CodeRabbit on #527, and correct — verified against the merge base that serialise predates the change while customise does not. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01U9zFxq8V4qxG4aMzJhGBFn

sonarqubecloud · 2026-08-05T09:14:36Z

Quality Gate passed

Issues
0 New issues
0 Accepted issues

Measures
0 Security Hotspots
0.0% Coverage on New Code
0.0% Duplication on New Code

See analysis details on SonarQube Cloud

codspeed-hq · 2026-08-05T09:21:57Z

Merging this PR will improve performance by ×2.9

⚠️

Different runtime environments detected

Some benchmarks with significant performance changes were compared across different runtime environments,
which may affect the accuracy of the results.

Open the report in CodSpeed to investigate

⚡ 1 improved benchmark
✅ 437 untouched benchmarks
⏩ 121 skipped benchmarks¹

Performance Changes

	Benchmark	`BASE`	`HEAD`	Efficiency
⚡	`test_empty_message_passes`	6.7 ms	2.3 ms	×2.9

Tip

Curious why this is faster? Comment @codspeedbot explain why this is faster on this PR, or directly use the CodSpeed MCP with your agent.

_{Comparing claude/refresh-sample-output-602anc (5289553) with main (a0d3f77)²}

121 benchmarks were skipped, so the baseline results were used instead. If they were deleted from the codebase, click here and archive them to remove them from the performance reports. ↩
No successful run was found on main (3ba4f08) during the generation of this report, so a0d3f77 was used instead as the comparison base. There might be some changes unrelated to this pull request in this report. ↩

The pin was v2.13.0, whose requirements.txt installs commit-check 2.13.1. That engine cannot resolve a rebase target existing only as origin/main in a pull request checkout, so it reported "not rebased" for a branch that was -- the false CC202 this workflow has carried since its first run. v2.13.1 of the action installs commit-check 2.13.4, which carries the merge-base fix from #532. Confirmed by reading requirements.txt at the tag rather than assuming the action version tracks the engine version: v2.13.0 (124de73) -> commit-check==2.13.1 v2.13.1 (562a184) -> commit-check==2.13.4 The branch was already rebased before this change -- git merge-base --is-ancestor origin/main HEAD returned true while CC202 still failed -- so the failure was the engine, not the branch, and rebasing again could never have fixed it. Two things ride along on the newer engine. Skipped checks now report as skipped rather than as passes (#537), so a run bypassed by ignore_authors says so instead of showing green ticks over nothing. And the imperative whitelist goes from 396 verbs to 529, retiring a class of false CC003 -- 2.13.1 rejected "treat", which #527 had added three releases earlier. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01U9zFxq8V4qxG4aMzJhGBFn

shenxianpeng requested a review from a team as a code owner August 5, 2026 09:04

coderabbitai Bot reviewed Aug 5, 2026

View reviewed changes

shenxianpeng changed the title ~~Expand imperative verb whitelist and improve validation logic~~ chore: expand imperative verb whitelist and improve validation logic Aug 5, 2026

shenxianpeng added the chore label Aug 5, 2026

shenxianpeng merged commit 1072b87 into main Aug 5, 2026
27 checks passed

shenxianpeng deleted the claude/refresh-sample-output-602anc branch August 5, 2026 09:20

This was referenced Aug 7, 2026

ci: run commit-check on every PR, and check the title as it will land #531

Merged

feat: check imperative mood by form rather than by vocabulary #540

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chore: expand imperative verb whitelist and improve validation logic - #527

chore: expand imperative verb whitelist and improve validation logic#527
shenxianpeng merged 3 commits into
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shenxianpeng commented Aug 5, 2026 •

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