Improving Atom's release notes / changelogs

[mnquintana]

Challenge

Being a very modular project, Atom has a lot of changes happening across a lot of repos. This can make it quite a challenge to keep track of all the changes being made in Atom from version to version. Unfortunately, that has sort of meant that our release notes end up being rather bare-bones summaries of what's changed in any particular version, rather than complete, well, changelogs. In addition, none of our bundled packages or libraries have any release notes at all right now - it's only Atom core.

I think it's important to publicly document every significant change we make to Atom across all of our repos, which should make it a lot easier for users to know what to expect from each release, and hopefully help prevent surprises like atom/toggle-quotes@8899f00#commitcomment-12552713 or #8226.

Proposal

1. Add CHANGELOG.md files to each package and library repo (or leverage GitHub Releases)
   • I'm personally 👍 for CHANGELOG.md files - they're version-controlled, simple to update, easy to discover, and will be displayed properly in settings-view.
2. Add a CHANGELOG.md to atom/atom to be used exclusively for core changes
3. Update them individually with each significant changes as they are made
4. Concatenate and organize all changelogs for atom.io/releases
   • For UI here it might be nice to take some inspiration from Firefox release notes - default to the short summary display, and offer a "view full list of changes" option for those who really want to dig deeper.
   • Maybe even add the ability to filter by package / library?
5. atom/atom release notes (ie. the notes used in GitHub Releases, rather than the CHANGELOG.md) can continue to work as the short summary of what changed.

/cc @atom/feedback

[izuzak]

This has been on my TODO list for a while -- I think it would be helpful. If someone is interested in working on this, perhaps we can team-up.

Thanks for creating a public issue to track this, @mnquintana. ❇️

[mnquintana]

@izuzak I'd love to help out with this 😄

[Stanzilla]

In the client, you could reuse the cards UI to represent the updated modules on the changelog page, expanding on click if the users wants to know more about what changed in that package that was included with the Atom update. Might be a lot of wasted space though..

[thedaniel]

This issue was moved to atom/atom.io#13

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