Once I have finished the SymPy release, I would like to make an update to how we do changelogs.
Right now, changelog entries are made manually on the wiki, at https://github.com/sympy/sympy/wiki/Release-Notes. The issue with this is that very few people update the release notes when pull request changes are made, so we end up with a long list of changes that need to be added to the release notes at release time. This results in the release notes generally not being done very well, because there are typically too many changes to reasonably go through and add to the notes. My suggestion is to require each pull request to add its own release notes entry as part of the PR. The PR won't be mergeable unless it has a release notes entry. The way to achieve this is to move the release notes from the wiki to the main SymPy repo. The process that seems to work well is this: - There is a directory changelog/ in the repo. Every pull request adds a new file to this directory. The name of the file does not matter (a good convention is branchname.rst). This file follows a template format, like **Backwards incompatible changes:** ... **Major changes:** ... **Minor changes:** ... (the header names could be different). Each PR adds bullet points for the changes made in that PR. Then at release time, the release script takes all the files in changelog.rst and amalgamates them into a single changelog file for that release. The separate files makes it so that there are never git merge conflicts (so long as people chose unique filenames). Each pull request would have a check in the tests to make sure that it adds or modifies a changelog file. There could also be some way to tell the tests that the change is too minor to require a changelog entry (say, if it has "SKIP CHANGELOG" in the PR text). This process was suggested to me by Anthony Scopatz, who uses it in Xonsh https://github.com/xonsh/xonsh/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.rst#changelog. I would appreciate any thoughts or suggestions on this. It will likely not be implemented until after the release. Aaron Meurer -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sympy" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/sympy. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sympy/CAKgW%3D6JnXOn7A%2B-J%2BMWRyg05CP05rq%2BzCJ719V2B9OaE5AyePw%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
