Enforce Conventional Commits specification with pre-commit hook

[AnnoDomine]

Background & Reference

Following up on the discussion in #222 (comment by @AnnoDomine) and the work on release automation in #228 and #229, we need standardized commit messages to support automated changelog generation and SemVer tracking.

Proposed changes

1. Adopt Conventional Commits 1.0.0: Standardize on standard types:
   • feat: (correlates with SemVer MINOR)
   • fix: (correlates with SemVer PATCH)
   • docs:, chore:, refactor:, test:, ci: (maintenance/no release trigger)
   • BREAKING CHANGE: footer or ! (correlates with SemVer MAJOR)
2. Enforce locally via pre-commit:
   • Configure a pre-commit hook (e.g., using commitizen or conventional-pre-commit on the commit-msg stage).
   • Document how contributors install and enable the hook via pre-commit install --hook-type commit-msg.
3. Documentation:
   • Add a brief commit message guide to CONTRIBUTING.md with examples.

Questions / Alignment

• Should the validation strictly enforce the hook on every local commit, or do maintainers enforce this on PR squash-and-merge titles in GitHub? (As noted by @MarkVDD in Bring seriousdb to a releaseable dependency state #222).
  • On every commit.

Related Issues

• Relates to Bring seriousdb to a releaseable dependency state #222
• Pre-requisite / feeder for automated release conventions (Maintainer setup required for automated releases #228, Add automated release workflow (TestPyPI + PyPI via Trusted Publishing) #229

[AnnoDomine]

target branch: chore/contributor-workflow-and-docs

[mattsva]

I'm not quite sure, but isn't this related to #30?

[AnnoDomine]

I'm not quite sure, but isn't this related to #30?

Yeah. right.

[AnnoDomine]

I'm not quite sure, but isn't this related to #30?

You relation you pointed to is a discussion.