Two rules of thumb that I’ve found useful:
- Introduce a version field top-level. If necessary, you can introduce a version 2, but keep the parser for version 1 around.
- You want to err on the side of using objects in place of single values, because you can add fields to an object without breaking backwards compatibility.
Yup. Commit messages are often shown in truncated form, which is when the dot helps to know whether you’re seeing the whole message or not.
Well, and every so often, I’ll use the commit message to document why a change was made, which requires multiple sentences. Then the dot just serves its usual purpose of separating sentences.