A single changelog

[reconbot]

💥 Proposal

What feature you'd like to see

I'd like to see a single global changelog for the project.

Motivation

The current changelogs aren't very helpful for understanding what changed when you upgrade. Dependent packages just say "version bump".

Pitch

Figure out how lerna generates these and see if it's got a better option.

[tkurki]

https://github.com/lerna/lerna-changelog apparently works on labeled PRs, so it would be a good idea to start labeling PRs so that eventually it will have something to chew on. And labels would be useful for hu-mans also.

The default labels are

• breaking (💥 Breaking Change)
• enhancement (🚀 Enhancement)
• bug (🐛 Bug Fix)
• documentation (📝 Documentation)
• internal (🏠 Internal)

[GazHank]

Hi @tkurki if we add these as labels, would I be correct to assume that this would just work going forward? That is to say reclassifying previous PRs wouldn't really help us?

[tkurki]

Sorry, I have not looked into how this project creates releases and I don't know if you can update just the notes for existing Github releases.

I just think it would make sense to

• pick a tool for generating release notes from commits or PRs
• start applying the mechanism (naming, GH labels, etc) that the tool uses
• add release notes generation to the release process

[GazHank]

I've added a couple of labels we can use in the future (breaking, and internal) for the others I think we should be able to map existing labels within the package.json:

{
  // ...
  "changelog": {
    "labels": {
      "breaking": ":boom: Breaking Change",
      "feature-request": ":rocket: Enhancement",
      "bug": ":bug: Bug Fix",
      "docs": ":memo: Documentation",
      "internal": ":house: Internal"
    }
  }
}

[GazHank]

A few observations so far while trying this:

• We will probably need to reclassify some PRs, this items is a good example, while adding this could be considered an enhancement, for most users this would probably just be an internal change
• we will need to see how well the lerna change log works with the overall package structure (Doesn't work well with independent mode lerna/lerna-changelog#26)
• While it seems to work for unreleased info (so could be used just before publication), the historic functioanlity doesnt seem to work (for me)

[GazHank]

I've drafted #2298 for now

I've kept this pretty close to the current change log, and we can drop the commiters info if we like (https://github.com/lerna/lerna-changelog#configuration) .

Based on this initial config at the moment it generates:

Unreleased (2021-07-19)

Chores

• #2294 Use Dependabot to keep node-abi up to date (@GazHank)

Committers: 1

• Gareth Hancock (@GazHank)