Documentation: changelog targeting contributors

[Aleksanaa]

Problem

People often propose modifications to the package and module structure and contribution guidelines. However, even if such a proposal is adopted, many contributors still won't know about it until some committers keep mentioning changes to them. Some major changes have corresponding RFCs, which is better in this case. Otherwise, we often need to explain it repeatedly.

Here are some historical or ongoing modifications that might fall into this category:

NOTE: This is not a reliable source. This is just a list of things that I remembered. If you want to know the progress of these changes, please search the relevant issues yourself.

1. Enforcing by-name directory structure for new packages
2. Manually adding mainProgram in meta field
3. Discouraging nested and toplevel with, especially meta = with lib; { which was written in nearly every package
4. Advocating mkDerivation (finalAttrs: { instead of mkDerivation rec {
5. Using pyproject instead of format in python packaging
6. Advocating fetchpatch2 instead of fetchpatch (?)
7. Adding strictDeps = true; where possible (Seems not continued?)

Proposal

1. After a proposal is fully discussed and consensus is reached, add an explanation about the content of the modification, the reason, possible regression and workarounds, and the planned treatment of existing packages/modules in the changelog. Each piece of content should still be sorted by the time when the PR that modified the changelog was proposed.

2. Remind all contributors in the PR template that they should check out the changelog regularly.

3. Adding the changelog should indicate that the modification proposal has been approved. Before this, we should not do treewide modifications to packages/modules, modify the documentation, or request related changes to other people's PRs. However, the process of modifying the basic building functions and documentation can be completed at the same time as the process of modifying the changelog.

Checklist

• checked latest Nixpkgs manual (source) and latest NixOS manual (source)
• checked open documentation issues for possible duplicates
• checked open documentation pull requests for possible solutions

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