Automate generating changelogs

[pktiuk]

Automated generation of changelogs would save a lot of time it would be good to integrate it with repository.
All would be based on semantic commit messages.

Things to do:

• Write scripts generating changelogs (markdown would be the best format), old changelogs should be preserved.
• integrate script generation with github actions (on merge to master + on publishing new release)
• (if possible) create scripts generating changelogs in Fedora link and Debian-based link format
• Write some simple guidelines for recommended naming of merge commits

[pktiuk]

Are there any ways of filtering commits to be mentioned in changelogs (by tags or by names/types of changed files)?
I don't want to fill our changelogs with README updates etc.

[gombosg]

I'll look into this, but first, Flathub and Fedora submission has priority.

[pktiuk]

Requirements for our changelogs:

• describe changes visible for end-users (changing readme, or any similar files doesn't count)
• don't include issues irrelevant for users (for example issues tagged as questions shouldn't be mentioned), I am not sure if issues should be mentioned in changelog at all 🤔
• avoid duplicates (for example if we have bug mentioned by issue and single Pull request fixing it, we should mention only one of them)
• It would be good to use Conventional Commits to have multiple categories

I am not sure about mentioning changes in code, which doesn't affect functionality (I mean cleanups, chores etc).

But in Release descriptions (visible on release site) we should show all the changes on repo since previous release Issues, Merges etc.
It would look there especially good, mainly because it is generated in Markdown and links relevant issues.

[gombosg]

https://github.com/github-changelog-generator/github-changelog-generator/wiki/Advanced-change-log-generation-examples
Here you can see which labels we can use.
Doing complex config is not possible here, if you want complex changelog, then we'll have to write it manually.

[pktiuk]

We could generate basic log, and later we could cut it using Python script (I can write this script).

[gombosg]

A simple git commit log command with sed or whatever?

[pktiuk]

I mean, we could generate regular changelog using this generator and later remove all of unwanted commits.

[pktiuk]

Or we could just generate these changelogs using your config and manually remove unwanted pieces (I think it will be the simplest solution, because removing some lines is pretty quick task).

[gombosg]

Okay, let's stick with that for now! :)

[gombosg]

For now I just changed labels for sections so that we can manually remove stuff.
We can also play around with section and PR labels: https://github.com/github-changelog-generator/github-changelog-generator/wiki/Advanced-change-log-generation-examples#section-options

So we'll only include e.g. enchantments and bugs, but not docs and packaging, or whatever.

[gombosg]

I'd close this issue for now, auto changelog generation works fine. We can reopen if more stuff comes up later. 🙂