Auto generation of release notes failure

[Boomatang]

Describe the bug
During the release process the release notes are auto generated.
These note do not reflect that actual change, and is comparing the wrong version.

What I have seen is the release notes is trying to compare the difference between v0.1.0 and version being released.

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:
Hard to reproduce without trying to create a release.

Expected behavior
It would be expected the at the change would be made between the version in previous in the chain.
This would mean that if v1.1.2 was released it would compare with v1.1.1. I mean the chain, and not the previous release as the previous release could be v1.2.1 or v1.1.4, if there is back porting of fixes happening

[Boomatang]

@didierofrivia you mention to me during the alpha-1 test run. Can you outline the manual steps that were previously carried out to resolve this issue on past release?

[eguzki]

sorry for hijacking this. What I did is to edit the release notes. Delete all, and run autogeneration of release notes but specifying the previous release version

[Boomatang]

I also have found this PR to softprops/action-gh-release which I think we would be need to be merged in order to fix this issue. The pull request has being opened for nearly two years now, so I am guess it will not be resolved any time soon.

softprops/action-gh-release#372

Without that fix, how do we go about resolving the issue for our use case.

[eguzki]

I am happy to hear from any new ideas on this regard.

[Boomatang]

I was thinking about what we could do, and now I am overly happy with. The first thing was update release doc to warn of this issue. That change has being merged, so that should help.

I am thinking we should stop trying to use the auto generation of the release note feature of action-gh-release, at least until the issue is fixed on their end. That action does does allow the adding of the release notes body so we could replace it with notes on how to generate the note correctly. But again that would be a stop gap.

There is also the possibility to generate the change log note via the GitHub api, and at that to the body of the release. However that would be a bit of work, and would raise the question why use the action-gh-release at all. If we are going to go to the effort of manually generation the release body via api calls we could as easily create the release using the api directly. The api allows the setting of the previous tag which is what we are needing to do. There would still be some work required to find what the previous tag should be, but in every case I think that would be required.

• https://docs.github.com/en/rest/releases/releases?apiVersion=2022-11-28#generate-release-notes-content-for-a-release

[eguzki]

Looks like promising workaround. Give it a try and let us know