Make release notes discoverable for Renovate

[setchy]

We use Renovate Bot to keep our application dependencies up-to-date. Overnight our bot detected the new 0.6.4 release, but it wasn't able to pull in any detailed release notes.

My understanding is renovate can pull from a few places, one being a CHANGELOG.md at the root of the repository. apollo-server is an example repository which correctly pulls in the change / release notes from its CHANGELOG.md

I raised a similar ticket a few weeks back for the federation libraries - see apollographql/federation#636.

[martinbonnin]

Hi @setchy 👋 ! The release notes are in RELEASE_NOTES.md.

If I understand correctly, renovate uses changelog-filename-regex, which itself should detect RELEASE_NOTES.md correctly.

So it should all work ? Or am I missing something ?

[setchy]

Hi @martijnwalraven, you're correct - I think at the time of posting the original issue it was not working as expected.

However I can confirm with the latest renovate v27.19.1 that its working again - so we can close this ticket

Example below

That said, it would be nice if an excerpt of the RELEASE_NOTES.md were additionally added to the github release tags . It's typically my first go-to for a quick summary

[setchy]

For those interesting: there is a separate semi-related renovate bug renovatebot/renovate#10955 that prevents the full delta of changelogs between the two versions. Example PR https://github.com/setchy/renovate-bot-testbed/pull/1

[martinbonnin]

That said, it would be nice if an excerpt of the RELEASE_NOTES.md were additionally added to the github release tags . It's typically my first go-to for a quick summary

I usually go to tags as well but I'm not a fan of duplicating the release notes in both tags and RELEASE_NOTES.md. It happens that we need to tweak the release notes sometimes and having to do it in 2 places is a recipe for discrepancies. One advantage of RELEASE_NOTES.md is that it's a searchable 1-page document so if you're looking for graphql-java support, you can search "17" and lookup the version relatively easily. I'm not sure if there are best practices around this yet? If not, I'd keep it this way for now.

[setchy]

Makes perfect sense @martinbonnin - i tend to agree.

I did find a few projects that can keep the tags sync'd with changelog.md (eg: https://github.com/dropseed/changerelease), but I cannot vouch for them first hand.

For now, I'm closing this as the original issue now seems to be resolved

[martinbonnin]

Sounds good 👍
PS: I think you have the wrong Marti(j)n. Martijn is more "federation-Martijn" and i'm more "jvm-Martin" :)

[setchy]

🤦 😅