Add a changelog to keep track of version differences

[ferozsalam]

I thought this might be useful to keep track of changes over time.
I am happy to maintain it, but ideally we could encourage PR authors
to add their changes as they go.

This might also be useful to get an idea of the appropriate version
change, depending on the significance of the included changes.

[jertel]

There was a changelog.md in the original repository. I deleted it since it duplicates the contents of the release notes here: https://github.com/jertel/elastalert2/releases. I try to avoid having to maintain duplicate content. But if enough feel strongly about having this inside the repository then we could stop putting the release notes in the GitHub releases area and instead place a single sentence instructing the reader to find the changes in the changelog.md.

Anyone else have an opinion on this?

[ferozsalam]

Fair enough, that's a good point. I was hoping for something a bit more curated, that separated out breaking changes from new features etc., so it would be easy to understand what things to worry about before upgrading...but that is potentially overengineering things at such an early stage.

[nsano-rururu]

I think that it is difficult to immediately judge whether it is a function addition, a document fix, or a bug fix if it is described in the current release notes.
If you make a ChangeLog, you can add alerts or fix bugs, but the description of library updates and document fixes is not included in ChangeLog.
If you don't create a ChangeLog, it may be better to at least list the release notes for each category.
For example, in the categories of feature additions, bug fixes, document fixes, and more. If that is the case, I think that ChangeLog will not be needed.

[ferozsalam]

@jertel do you have complete control of the content of the release notes? Or is it auto-generated by Github when tagging a release?

[jertel]

@jertel do you have complete control of the content of the release notes? Or is it auto-generated by Github when tagging a release?

It's a free-form text field so I can enter anything. But I'm starting to be swayed towards the changelog.md. I like that you all can help construct that content. It's been a 20+ minute process for the past 2 releases to assemble all the PRs and get them formatted correctly to make that bulleted list, and then review for incomplete PR descriptions, etc. So I could use the help on that.