[Pulp-dev] Release Note Process Improvements

[Dana Walker]

My initial thought is this looks useful to the user and very clean.  I've
also found it to be a burden trying to write good release notes, having to
dig through commits and try to decide what's important enough and what's
not, so +1 to trying to improve this process for both the releaser and user.

However:
"towncrier works best in a development system where all merges involve
closing a ticket."
We frequently make use of "[noissue]" in our PRs, in part to lower the
burden on contributors making small fixes.  Would we want to move to a
model where we *must* have an issue?  Are we instead assuming those items
are small enough that the user doesn't need to see it in the release notes?

Thoughts?

--Dana

Dana Walker

She / Her / Hers

Software Engineer, Pulp Project

Red Hat <https://www.redhat.com>

dawalker at redhat.com
<https://www.redhat.com>



On Thu, May 23, 2019 at 3:49 PM Brian Bouterse <bbouters at redhat.com> wrote:

> 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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