scientific-python / changelist Goto Github PK

It might be nice to have a link to an example of the output of the action somehwhere on the readme :)

It would be useful to prioritize certain sections, such as the API changes. For skimage, I imagine we'd want new features, then API changes, then all the rest. So maybe something like:

priority_categories = [a, b, c]

?

I think it would be nice to document alternatives to changelist somewhere and how changelist defines its scope in regards to those alternatives. That would help with feature scoping and decision making.

Should be ','.join(authors).

May be better to format as a list instead?

Would be nice to have a clear set of the minimal required version for all dependencies in the release notes. It should be easy enough to parse a pyproject.toml if present.

Such as dependabot

We've had a couple of confused first PR submitters who think the red-x of not having a label means that they did something wrong. It might be better to make having a label be a requirement for merging (since it is assigned by the maintainer who presumably will merge it) rather than a Github-Action checking whether there is a label.

How hard would it be to configure the label check as a merge requirement rather than a CI action?

Adds a bit of visual noise, when the hashtag-PR-number at the end of the line already indicates a clear line termination

It would be nice to add the option to include supported Python versions from the classifiers. For example, see

• https://networkx.org/documentation/stable/release/release_3.2.1.html

Maybe a flag?

• Description
  (hash-nr).

X authors added to -> contributed to
X reviewers added to -> contributed to

One critique of the approach taken by changelist, is that the relation between pull requests and a summary (a single bullet point) in the release notes isn't always 1-to-1. E.g.

• 1pr-to-many: A pull requests addresses multiple things which should ideally appear as multiple summaries. Possibly even in separate sections.
• many-to-1sum: A change or update is realized in multiple pull requests. However, thematically the entire change or description should go into one summary.

I've been thinking about how we could address these concerns. For 1pr-to-many, we could allow multiple release-note blocks in a pull request description. The only question would be, how to encode the labels for each of these items. Maybe something like (ignore escaping \)

\```release-note
{{label: Enhancement}} Add new `mask` parameter to `foo` to allow masking of values.
\```

\```release-note
{{label: Bug fix}} Fix endless loop in `foo` if NaN is passed as input. 
\```

This would basically override the pull request title (as it already does) and additionally the labels. Personally I'd like to have this option to address cases where the pull requests scoping is difficult.

Still brainstorming an approach to account for many-to-1sum. Maybe something like

\```release-note
{{link: #2381}}
\```

I am not settled on the syntax or details yet. But I am curious what you think?

Would allow customization for

• the regular expressions matching PR labels
• Header customization. Though I think the scope of changelist should be automation of the stuff that's repetitive and really annoying to do manually. So this aspect could be very lightweight.
• ignored user logins

Make the default autoformatter happy.

The release notes generator we used previously generated credit for new contributors:

New Contributors

 • @some-person-name made their first contribution in #57

This would be nice to have!

A release looks something like this:

$ changelist ${ORG}/${REPO} v${PREVIOUS} main --version ${VERSION} >> ${VERSION}.md
$ # Add ${VERSION}.md to CHANGELOG.md
$ # Update `version` in `pyproject.toml`
$ git add pyproject.toml CHANGELOG.md
$ git commit -m "Designate ${VERSION} release"
$ git tag -s v${VERSION} -m "signed ${VERSION} tag"
$ git push --tags origin main
$ # Make a github release from the tag

The first two manual steps are project specific and can be easily scripted there or handled manually.

However, it would be nice to help automate the last manual step so I could use changelist to create a GitHub release for the tagged release with ${VERSION}.md as the body or note and v${VERSION} as the title (with the option for it to be a pre-release).

https://pygithub.readthedocs.io/en/latest/github_objects/GitRelease.html

As recommended in https://keepachangelog.com/en/1.0.0/, release notes or changelogs should contain a date in some form. It's easy enough to include if we settle on what should be the truth. I tend to think it should be the timestamp of the last given revision (stop_rev). This should lead to a correct release date for most cases.

Currently most of the projects use prettier to autoformat markdown. I think changelist should generate markdown that passes the standard .pre-commit-config.yaml we've been using. For example, like the one changelist uses itself.

There may be other issues, but when I generated the CHANGELOG entry for changelist 0.2 the linter had to add a newline after the headings (e.g., ## Enhancements).

Simply setting the level in

is not enough as this doesn't get propagated to loggers in other submodules.