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Drop CHANGELOG.md and generate Changelog automatically #119
Description
Activity
I feel exactly the same about the manually maintained
CHANGELOG.mdsolution. Also I never had the use case to look at the changelog on the local disk (which wouldn't be possible with the proposed solution).So from me it's a clear go for the proposal 👍
I do understand that maintaining a change log is a hassle but for me it is what works best. From all the tools I have looked to automate this, were a disappointment to me. They do lack structure in their output and or require sings to be put in commit messages and or are bound to a specific GIT hosting API (GitHubt, GitLab, Bitbucket etc.).
I would like to be surprised and not have to do this manually.
We can still alter the release notes after it has been generated if something is not worded appropriately, but at least the manual collection of the changes is automated and we have a good starting point for minor adjustments.
I'd say it's definitely worth to give it a try. Also in my opinion it's not really a requirement to be Git hosting provider independent.
The release-changelog-builder GH action seems simple and extendable enough.
The Kubernetes release notes generator might also be interesting. (See crossplane/crossplane#1828)
So I played around with the changelog builder, even for a project that uses Goreleaser.
https://github.com/ccremer/k8up/releases
I keep the fork around for a bit, but not too long :)
some other pic with documentation
Config (labels & template) here: https://github.com/ccremer/k8up/blob/v1.1.0/.github/changelog-configuration.json
Please have a look and we can discuss our further steps. But it looks pretty nice :)
We could further discuss whether the "changes" need to be further separated.
The breaking changes are especially important for users to migrate, but with the same label called "change" this would also include irrelevant changes like "Optimize GitHub workflow" (which are neither features nor bugfixes).
Maybe make a separate label for breaking changes? Is it worth the separation?We have gone ahead with K8up already: https://github.com/vshn/k8up/releases/tag/v1.0.0-rc2
Context
Currently, we maintain a CHANGELOG.md from https://keepachangelog.com, however the maintenance of this file is (IHMO) a pain:
My proposal:
Both approaches (keepachangelog) and the generated one from the Action require discipline, but the generated one reduces this discipline to maintain nice PR titles (which we hopefully do already) and setting labels if categorization is required. But even without categorization, it's included in the changelog. More automation, more better :)
Alternatives
Go-based projects can use https://goreleaser.com/ to generate a changelog directly from commits. Other programming languages may or may not have something similar that can be integrated into GH Actions. This proposal is not about dropping Goreleaser or its feature in order to make every Syn-project have the same look of the changelog, but rather enabling automation for those projects that don't have any sort of changelog generation at all.