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I don't understand why a changelog is necessary nowadays. Surely all the benefits that the author addresses here could be dynamic features of Github, Gitlab, et

by rlpb 12y ago

I don't understand why a changelog is necessary nowadays. Surely all the benefits that the author addresses here could be dynamic features of Github, Gitlab, etc? He does answer the FAQ "I already use GitHub Releases. Why do I need this?" but his answer doesn't really address the point that this comes down to missing functionality in such tooling and should be fixed there, rather than in a static file generator.

mercurial 12y ago
> I don't understand why a changelog is necessary nowadays. Surely all the benefits that the author addresses here could be dynamic features of Github, Gitlab, etc? Personally, I wouldn't want to go to Github every time I download a new version of a library. Text files are fine.
skywinder 12y ago
I also want to make close integration with GitHub Releases. Here is an issue with details: https://github.com/skywinder/github-changelog-generator/issues/56 https://github.com/skywinder/github-changelog-generator/issu...
hobarrera 12y ago
Personally, I'm not a big fan of GitHub releases. They're not really part of my code, or my repo. They're some metadata locked inside github that doesn't carry along with the project. A CHANGELOG.md is part of your repo/project. You can change where you host your git repos (eg: gitlab), and carry that over. Disclaimer: I don't use changelogs either. I can't be bothered with them. Users technical enough to want to know what's been changed in such fine grained detail can use `git log --oneline`.
tenfingers 12y ago
A generated changelog and/or a list of changes straight out of source control is not a substitute for a good release notes files. In fact, while I used to do the same in the past (back to cvsps!), I now just use the log as a template for what I'm going to write, to remember what I did. As an user I'm not interested in source details, minor cosmetic fixes and internals. I want to know what's new compared to the last release, what are the user facing changes, and any upgrade issues I might be facing. These are usually expressed just in a few paragraphs in a very discursive fashion. I personally hate straight-form-source changelogs. I do not read them as an user (too verbose), I don't use them as a developer (I use the scm directly!). There's a tendency for developers using git to conflate the two, since history can be rewritten. I think it's a major mistake. Commit logs are meant to aid developers. Commit logs will inevitably contain redundant information about the same logical change, even when you try hard to hide it. This is all useless information for users. On the contrary, dumbing down the history just for the sake of readability will also hurt the developers in the long run.
- rlpb 12y ago
  I'm all for release notes being written. Just not changelogs.

by rlpb 12y ago

mercurial 12y ago

> I don't understand why a changelog is necessary nowadays. Surely all the benefits that the author addresses here could be dynamic features of Github, Gitlab, etc? Personally, I wouldn't want to go to Github every time I download a new version of a library. Text files are fine.

skywinder 12y ago

I also want to make close integration with GitHub Releases. Here is an issue with details: https://github.com/skywinder/github-changelog-generator/issues/56 https://github.com/skywinder/github-changelog-generator/issu...

hobarrera 12y ago

Personally, I'm not a big fan of GitHub releases. They're not really part of my code, or my repo. They're some metadata locked inside github that doesn't carry along with the project. A CHANGELOG.md is part of your repo/project. You can change where you host your git repos (eg: gitlab), and carry that over. Disclaimer: I don't use changelogs either. I can't be bothered with them. Users technical enough to want to know what's been changed in such fine grained detail can use `git log --oneline`.

tenfingers 12y ago

A generated changelog and/or a list of changes straight out of source control is not a substitute for a good release notes files. In fact, while I used to do the same in the past (back to cvsps!), I now just use the log as a template for what I'm going to write, to remember what I did. As an user I'm not interested in source details, minor cosmetic fixes and internals. I want to know what's new compared to the last release, what are the user facing changes, and any upgrade issues I might be facing. These are usually expressed just in a few paragraphs in a very discursive fashion. I personally hate straight-form-source changelogs. I do not read them as an user (too verbose), I don't use them as a developer (I use the scm directly!). There's a tendency for developers using git to conflate the two, since history can be rewritten. I think it's a major mistake. Commit logs are meant to aid developers. Commit logs will inevitably contain redundant information about the same logical change, even when you try hard to hide it. This is all useless information for users. On the contrary, dumbing down the history just for the sake of readability will also hurt the developers in the long run.

rlpb 12y ago
I'm all for release notes being written. Just not changelogs.