towncrier VS release-plz

I don't really like writing the change log automatically from commits. I think those both have a slightly different audience and thus need different wording.

I know the frustration of merge conflicts on the change log file.

Right now, I'm creating change logs by hand which is time consuming to do on release time. I'm considering switching to using towncrier or something similar, where you have a changes dir with one file per change for creating change logs --> https://towncrier.readthedocs.io/

Here is an example of another decent one. Not perfect, but it is generated with TownCrier, so it is easy to maintain.

We used to... somewhat attempt manual changelogs. Every time it came to a release the release manager would ask around for what the key changes were, and we usually ended up with only a couple of entries.

Now, we use https://github.com/twisted/towncrier . Every change goes through pull requests, and every PR must have a newsfragment file - and we enforce this with a test that fails if it isn't present (with convenience functions of rewriting the number to match the PR if you name the news file XXX.{category}). If it's not a user-facing change, then we just have a category that is ignored.

On releases (or on individual PRS along the way), the release manager generates the changelog, but also edits them into a relatively coherent style (or rewrites developers news fragments along the way).

Every change has a note written aimed at the user. Every entry in the changelog has a link to the relevant PR or commit. We have much better changelogs now.

Twisted's Town Crier is a generic tool

My problem with maintaining a changelog during development is it can serve as a source of merge conflicts. Instead, I follow Covnentional Commit style and manually write my changelog entries based on the commits. I have a tool [0] that can show me the relevant commits for a package in my repo and automates the entire release process, including doing sanity checks.

I also feel like releasing from CI is hard, especially if you have multiple packages in a repo [1], including

- You can't as easily introspect the process

- You can't as easily recover from failure

- Getting a lot of the nuance right, like handling releases concurrent to merging of PRs, is difficult

- When the workflow is an ever-present "release PR" that you merge when ready has issues with selecting which packages to release and at what version

I have been considering making a tool to generate changelogs from fragments. Been keeping notes at https://github.com/epage/epage.github.io/issues/23

[0]: https://github.com/crate-ci/cargo-release

[1]: https://github.com/MarcoIeni/release-plz/discussions/1019

Hi 👋 I maintain release-plz, a project enabling maintainers to release Rust packages automatically.

How does this tool differ from release-plz?: https://github.com/marcoIeni/release-plz

Nice, very simple. I like it! You might also want to check out my project: https://github.com/MarcoIeni/release-plz