splitMessages does not strip bullet prefix from GitHub squash merge COMMIT_MESSAGES format

[tyrantkhan]

Describe the bug

When using GitHub's squash merge with squash_merge_commit_message: COMMIT_MESSAGES, GitHub formats each commit in the squash body with a * (markdown bullet) prefix. splitMessages does not strip this prefix, so only the squash commit title is parsed as a conventional commit — the body entries are silently ignored.

This means multi-commit PRs with different conventional commit types (e.g. feat + fix) only produce one changelog entry (from the PR title), even though release-please documents support for multiple conventional commits in a single commit.

Expected behavior

Given a squash merge commit with this body:

feat: #37 test release-please without bullet prefix

* fix: #37 add inline comment to repo URL

* feat: #37 add comment to update check

Release-please should parse all three conventional commits and produce both a Features and Bug Fixes section in the changelog.

Actual behavior

Only the commit title (feat: ...) is parsed. The * fix: ... and * feat: ... entries in the body are ignored because the * prefix prevents the splitMessages regex from matching:

/\r?\n\r?\n(?=(?:feat|fix|docs|style|refactor|perf|test|build|ci|chore|revert)(?:\(.*?\))?: )/

Reproduction

I verified this with two PRs on the same repo (tyrantkhan/bitbucket-cli):

Test 1 — with * bullets (fails):

• PR #35 squash merged as commit a0f187a
• Squash commit body contained * fix: ... and * feat: ... (GitHub's default COMMIT_MESSAGES format)
• Release-please changelog: only Features (from PR title)

Test 2 — without * bullets (works):

• PR #38 squash merged as commit 59b2219
• Squash commit body had * prefixes manually removed and blank line separation added
• Release-please changelog: both Features and Bug Fixes appeared

Result: Release PR #36 shows both entries from the manually edited commit, but only the title entry from the default GitHub format.

Environment

• release-please version: 17.3.0 (also tested on 17.1.3 via release-please-action@v4)
• GitHub repo setting: squash_merge_commit_message: COMMIT_MESSAGES, squash_merge_commit_title: COMMIT_OR_PR_TITLE

Context

• Related: Bug: splitMessages function fails to handle multiple conventional commits #2357 (original bug report about splitMessages not handling multiple conventional commits)
• Related: feat: handle multiple commits in a single message #2358 (fix merged Sept 2024, but did not address the * bullet prefix)

Suggested fix

Strip leading * or - from lines before applying the splitMessages regex, or update the regex lookahead to optionally match a bullet prefix:

/\r?\n\r?\n(?=\*?\s*(?:feat|fix|docs|style|refactor|perf|test|build|ci|chore|revert)(?:\(.*?\))?: )/

[chingor13]

Unfortunately, we do not plan to support this. There has been previous discussion on this topic, but the gist of it is that in-progress commits on a branch may be local to the branch and do not actually reflect the change as a whole when merged into the main branch. Instead, we opt for having the maintainer be responsible for crafting the commit message when merging. We even have the ability to specify multiple commit lines in a single commit or fix the commit message.