rever release notes

@scopatz: The new rever release process seems to not be making useful release notes on https://github.com/conda-forge/conda-smithy/releases. The last few just have whatever the last commit message was, versus the previous ones that actually had a list of changes. Not sure if that was hand-generated before or automatic somehow, but at least if it was automatic, that was better than the current setup. 😃

Edit: actually it looks like they were hand-written before. A list of the merged PRs and their titles, or something like that, would be far more useful than just last-commit-message (which is typically either meaningless or even misleading, because it only mentions the most recent change).

[scopatz]

Hi @dougalsutherland @jakirkham, I didn’t add the rever changelog features originally because I wanted to perform a minimal change, and the current changelog is hand-written anyway.

You can read about how the system works at https://regro.github.io/rever-docs/devguide.html#changelog, and rever and xonsh and other projects use this system. You can see the results at https://github.com/regro/rever/releases and https://github.com/xonsh/xonsh/releases. But basically the idea is:

• With each PR, the author adds a changelog entry to a known place (the news/ dir)
• Changelog entries are given in their own file for each branch, so there aren’t constant conflicts merging into master
• At release time, rever combines the entries, adds them to the global changelog and the GitHub Release

This system shifts the responsibility for writing the changelog to the authors at the time of PR, rather than the release manager at the time of release. I personally have found this to be a major advantage, but didn’t want to impose this without community input.

In xonsh, we even have a bot that checks that a news item has been added or modified!

I am happy to add this feature to conda-smithy (and other conda-forge projects) if folks are interested.

[djsutherland]

That sounds like a good system to me. 👍 on using it here.