[Pulp-dev] Release Note Process Improvements

[Brian Bouterse]

In discussion with some other devs, I've realized that pulpcore and
pulpcore-plugin would benefit from better release notes. Here are some of
the reasons that have come up:

* The release notes are incomplete. One person tries to go through and
write release notes just before the release happens, and by that point, the
number of changes are too many for this approach to produce complete and
robust notes.
* They are hard to produce. Producing "all the release notes" is a mentally
difficult task.
* We try to substitute with Redmine, but this approach limits us (a) it's
now difficult and time consuming to see what changed, (b) there is way more
detail than you actually want, and they aren't self-contained (can't be
browsed off-line).
* overall all ^ leads to both users and plugin writers feeling uncertain
about what has changed in the last release, week, or even day.

So what can we do? Recently I contributed to aiohttp and I found their
release note process light and easy. It produces high-quality release notes
like these:  https://aiohttp.readthedocs.io/en/stable/changes.html

You can read about their process here:
https://aiohttp.readthedocs.io/en/stable/contributing.html#changelog-update
You can see some examples of these release note files in their repo here:
https://github.com/aio-libs/aiohttp/tree/master/CHANGES  Overall it makes
use of the towncrier project https://github.com/hawkowl/towncrier

What do you all think about trying something like this for pulpcore and
pulpcore-plugin? Please write back on-list with thoughts, ideas, concerns,
alternatives, etc.

Also, I made us a starter issue to coalesce some more of the practical
aspect of adopting a change like this:  https://pulp.plan.io/issues/4875

All the best,
Brian
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