[Proposal] Maintain a changelog for OSD repo

Hi Team,

When I was driving the OSD 2.3.0 release, I had to review all the changes made between the current release branch and the previous one in order to write release notes. The process could be expedited if we kept a CHANGELOG, where the commit owner added context each time a PR was merged to the main branch, even though it’s good to gain knowledge for myself reading PRs. In addition, we can automate the release notes PR cut by obtaining data from CHANGELOG.md.

Notes: OpenSearch repo is also following this practice https://github.com/opensearch-project/OpenSearch/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md

Ref: https://keepachangelog.com/en/1.0.0/

Thanks, Louis

[seraphjiang]

I’m proposing deprecating changelog file which cause more issue than the benefit. we should figure out better solution to generate release note for sure.

https://github.com/opensearch-project/OpenSearch/issues/4769

https://github.com/opensearch-project/OpenSearch/issues/1868

FYI

@noCharger @ruanyl @ahopp @ashwin-pc @kavilla @joshuarrrr

cc: @dblock

[ruanyl]

Totally agree that writing CHANGELOG at the point when making a release could be frustrating because the people drafting the release may not have a full context of the commits.

I have a proposal here https://github.com/opensearch-project/OpenSearch-Dashboards/issues/2189 about fully automating the release process which includes the CHANGELOG generating.

The idea is to ensure each PR contains a description file to state what/why changes, a GitHub bot can do the PR verification to make sure the description file exists. It is good because the reviewers can not only comment on the actual code but also on the descriptions.

When preparing a new release, these description files are “consumed” to generate the CHANGELOG automatically.