[vtk-developers] Thoughts on changelog maintenance?

[Ben Boeckel]

On Tue, Nov 07, 2017 at 12:54:02 -0700, David Gobbi wrote:
> In a perfect world, the changelog would be generated automatically from all
> of the issues that were closed between releases.  That would require much
> more frequent use of the issue tracker (which would be a good thing).
> Issues and MRs would continue to be tied together via gitlab references.

Even issues aren't 1:1 for "what's important" in a release. It's better,
but still not much better than using the git log (IMO).

> If someone wanted to see the latest changelog for master, they would just
> go to gitlab's list of closed issues.  The changelog put into the source
> upon release would just be an md file that was a copy of the same.

But asking "what's different between 8.1 and 9.0?" is hard because you
have to know dates to filter on (and I'm not sure how good Gitlab's
filters are there).

> Overall, though, I'm not sure if a new changelog mechanism is even needed.
> The current workflow (summarizing our changes at release time) already
> seems pleasantly lightweight.

The issue is that during releases, some people can take weeks to reply.
How long do we wait? If we're going to end up going through ourselves
anyways, why not try and get it upfront? Plus, we tend to miss any fixes
after rc1 since we don't send emails again.

--Ben