Changelog Conflicts are Annoying

[cwfitzgerald]

Right now, the way we manage our changelog is that each individual PR adds its own entry to the changelog in the appropriate section. This is a good first step as it decentralizes our changelog authoring and makes publishing less annoying.

This does leave us with two problems though:

• Conflicts on the changelog happen a lot. Both in standard PRs and backporting PRs, the changelog will almost always be in conflict.
• The changelog format isn't terribly strict and can often get munged by conflicts. This requires a decent amount of cleanup on publish.

We should investigate possible solutions to this problem and see if they are worth the trouble. One particular solution would be for each PR to include a yaml-type changelog in a separate file, then have a tool combine all of them into a single changelog. This should get rid of most of the merge points, but would require an xtask-like tool to merge all of them into the final changelog.

[mockersf]

On Bevy, we are using custom tooling that can extract sections from the PR description and merge them in a single file. It's also using PR tags for organisation.

At work, we are using https://github.com/changesets/changesets. It creates individual changelog files for each PR, and merge them at release time.