[Paraview-developers] [RFC] Changelog process?

[Cory Quammen]

I like it, though as someone who puts together the release notes,
usually it doesn't take too long to go through the git commit logs,
clean up the description and make the language usage consistent. If we
have a variety of snippets from different authors, I'll likely still
have to do at least the language consistency editing. Also, folks may
forget to add a snippet, reviewers will forget to require it if it is
missing, so I'll likely go through the git commit log anyway to see
what got missed...

Cory

On Wed, Sep 13, 2017 at 10:44 AM, Ben Boeckel <ben.boeckel at kitware.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> After some discussion with Utkarsh, would anyone be opposed to having
> ParaView adopt a directory (maybe `Documentation/rel/dev`?) in which to
> drop markdown snippets which contain changelog snippets for merge
> requests? This is similar to the process used for CMake for those
> familiar.
>
> At release, all of the files would be gathered up, put into a single
> file (`Documentation/rel/VERSION.md`?) and would be our changelog for
> the release. On release, all of the snippets in the `dev` subdirectory
> would be removed (this makes it easy to see what is new, but not
> released as well).
>
> The robot would warn (not error) if a merge request doesn't add or
> modify a file in the directory, mainly to remind developers that
> changelog entries should be added.
>
> Why not just use commit or merge request messages? Just scraping the git
> logs has (at least) the following downsides:
>
>   - no way to edit or remove old entries (typos, reverts, etc.);
>   - no place for extras (such as images); and
>   - special formatting for messages to say that they're "not important"
>     (e.g., typos, reformatting) and should not be put into the
>     changelog.
>
> A single file is not ideal due to the conflicts that inevitably occur
> when multiple merge requests are happening at the same time.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> --Ben
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-- 
Cory Quammen
Staff R&D Engineer
Kitware, Inc.