How to Add Release Notes or URL to existing Packages

[hms54]

Newbie question: How can release notes or release URL be added to packages that are currently being maintained?

I notice a lot of packages don't have these, but find they are freely available on the official website for the product. I would be glad to submit links, but don't want to disturb the current maintainer's efforts.

[vpexxi]

I think You can literally just jump in and update the manifest yourself—here’s how: fork the winget-pkgs repo, browse to the package’s folder under manifests<Publisher><AppName>\, open the .yaml file and add (or update) the ReleaseNotes: field with a short summary and/or the ReleaseNotesUrl: field pointing at the official changelog page, then run winget validate locally (or use the wingetcreate CLI) to sanity-check your changes and open a PR. The CLA bot will ping you if you need to sign, and the current maintainers will get notified automatically—no need to worry about “disturbing” them, since small metadata updates like these are exactly the kind of thing they welcome......

[hms54]

Thanks. I will certainly give this a try. It will be educational to see how the process works, but I assume it will only fix the package for the version I update. If so, I'm wondering if it might be better to ask the regular maintainer to include the Release URL in their process to ensure all future versions include it as well?

[vpexxi]

just pull requests ..propose changes to a repo—you fork or branch the code, push your edits, and open a PR so the maintainers can review and merge them—but keep in mind that updating via a PR only fixes that single version’s manifest; if you’d rather not repeat the same edit every time a new release comes out, it’s worth opening an issue or discussion with the winget-pkgs maintainers asking them to bake ReleaseNotesUrl into the default manifest template or CI pipeline so that every future version automatically includes the release-notes link...