Auto Generate Changelog

[oojo12]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
This is more of a maintenance task to make it obvious and easy to see what changes have happened over the life of the project.

Describe the solution you'd like
I'm thinking of using an action to generate the Changelog on releases.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Considered GitHub Actions and some other functions for doing it. Decided to stick with native GitHub tooling.

Feel free to assign to me, as I think it would be fun to do.

[sarah-quinones]

EDIT: nvm, i mixed up the changelog with the realease notes

i think for something like this, i'd rather generate the changelog manually. it's not too much of a maintenance burden and it would probably be higher quality since i could organize stuff by order of importance.

what do you think?

[sarah-quinones]

what does an automatically generated changelog look like? are there any projects that do this that we can get inspiration from?

[oojo12]

an example below however it can be customized based on labels

another example here

Personally, I am not aware of any that use it.

[sarah-quinones]

we can give this a try and see if it works well for our case. i'll assign this to you since you're fine with it

[oojo12]

Updated 11/28/22

So then here are my brief thoughts:

Instead of the date the header will be the SemaVer release.

Labels Included in Changelog

1. Security - security related updates
2. Breaking changes - Things that are breaking changes
3. Bug - bug fixes
4. Enhancement - new features within a crate
5. Infrastructure - infra changes (like CI/CD, non-breaking API changes etc)
6. Maintenance - routine maintenance task (i.e., increasing test coverage, benchmarking, dependency deduplication, making functions more modular, updating packages, etc)
7. Documentation - document updates
8. Good first issue (if you want to highlight new contributors). Though this could be superseded by any of the above.

Labels Excluded from Changelog

1. Questions
2. Help wanted

I think the above would be a concise way to group project changes in the long term and can easily be updated as conventions change. Thinking the changelog should print them in that order as it seems to me what should be most important.

I'll go ahead and try to make something like this and see how it goes.

For my recollection

• Follow conventional commits
• Possible implementation tool for making Changelog
• Write Action to use decided standard to auto add/remove labels to/from PR.

[sarah-quinones]

can't wait to see what you come up with

[mhovd]

I have heard great things about git-cliff (https://github.com/orhun/git-cliff), written by one of the ratatui developers. They use it to generate their changelogs, which looks neat.