Publish release notes

[Marcono1234]

Could you please publish release notes, in general but also specifically for the recently released version 1.0.1?

Ideally those release notes would

• be consumable by tools like Dependabot (e.g. by using GitHub Releases or CHANGELOG.md files, ...)
• only include changes relevant for users
  And not include "chore(deps): bump ..." messages (unless they are relevant to users, e.g. for transitive dependencies), which projects often include in auto-generated release notes, but which add little benefit for users.

One way would be to leverage the GitHub Releases for that, editing their descriptions to be more descriptive.

Thanks!

[andreaTP]

Thanks @Marcono1234 for filing this issue!

I agree we are lacking proper release notes, I try to do a blog post for any minor release, but there is no process in place for patches or anything else.

Ideally this should be fully automated, but I don't have a good "reference implementation" of how it would look like.
Probably an AI powered tool would pull out the job well, need to do some research.

[Marcono1234]

I try to do a blog post for any minor release

That would probably still be useful, and could then be linked to for additional information from the release notes?

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Ideally this should be fully automated, but I don't have a good "reference implementation" of how it would look like.

One approach could be to create a GitHub draft release and keep adding entries when PRs are merged. But that would be manual work and might be a bit error-prone.

Another approach could be to use PR titles (or special markers in the description or comments for the changelog entry) and then a label to classify PRs. It seems something similar is done by many of the Maven-related projects, see for example https://github.com/apache/maven-compiler-plugin/releases. I think that leads to quite useful release notes.

I think I have also seen some projects which had a CHANGELOG.md file (or similar) and then had a PR check which required that CHANGELOG.md was modified, unless the PR was labelled / marked as not requiring a changelog entry.

There are probably other good approaches as well.

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Probably an AI powered tool would pull out the job well

As long as its output is correct and not unnecessarily verbose, that might work as well. But I am not sure if that is really necessary, or if the other automated approaches such as those mentioned above, would work equally well (or better, and cheaper?).

[andreaTP]

Thanks for getting back!

Regarding CHANGELOG.md: I contribute to projects that are using this approach(e.g. fabric8/kuberntes-client), and I don't really like it.
It causes a continuous need of updates, and fixing merge conflicts as soon as there is more than 1 PR in flight.

That said, I tried to use the "Generate release notes" button in the GH UI, quickly edited it and the result seems decent: https://github.com/bytecodealliance/endive/releases/tag/1.0.1
The effort seems to be small enough.

Let me know what do you think!