[Release] How to create release note?

[kou]

Describe the enhancement requested

From #496 (comment) :

I suppose we should consider something like conventional commits for this repo too? Or else manually curate a CHANGELOG.md?

[kou]

@wgtmac Do you have any preference for this?

[lidavidm]

I have a slight preference for conventional commits given we use it on go and ADBC. But we could keep the existing format and just write a script to scrape commits and make a basic changelog too.

[wgtmac]

Is there any benefit from conventional commits to create release note? @lidavidm

I don't have a preference yet. I used JIRA to create release note for Apache ORC and Apache Parquet (before switching to Github issue) which is convenient.

I am not sure if we can leverage this to customize it: https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/releasing-projects-on-github/automatically-generated-release-notes

[lidavidm]

The GitHub generation looks interesting. Why don't we try it out?

Conventional commits is basically just a common standard. It's not too different from the existing convention, just instead of [CI] or [C++] it's chore(ci): ... or feat(c++): ...

[kou]

OK. Let's try it for the next release.
We can revisit this after the next release.

[lidavidm]

I think we'll need to set up some labels, and then probably some automation to ensure labels are applied to PRs. Maybe to start with just breaking-change, bug-fix, and enhancement categories, and an action that asks for at least one of the three to be set?

[lidavidm]

@kou @jbonofre do we want to get this done before the release? Or will we just use the default changelog for now?

[jbonofre]

@kou @jbonofre do we want to get this done before the release? Or will we just use the default changelog for now?

Both is ok for me. But clearly it has to be fixed.

[lidavidm]

If those three tags are OK, I can set them up real quick and go back and tag PRs (maybe also a chore tag for things like CI/release processes)

[jbonofre]

FYI, on Apache Camel, we just use GitHub Milestone link. Maybe we can start from there ?

[lidavidm]

Right, that's what I meant by "default changelog", GitHub just puts all the commits into the milestone. If that's ok then feel free to proceed.

I'd like to do a bit of categorization eventually though since a changelog of just "bump dependency" is a bit cluttered and not very useful.

[jbonofre]

Yes, and also maybe we can also create some "manual" GitHub Issues on the target milestone (if it helps the end users).

[lidavidm]

I believe the changelog will just use commit messages since the base tag

[kou]

Ah, we may need to write a release note for 18.2.0 manually. Because there is no base tag now...

[lidavidm]

Right, that's why I asked if we should just push a base tag to use

[jbonofre]

Yup, as said on this other issue, I will do a git log to create issues for this milestone.

[lidavidm]

I don't think we need to backfill issues necessarily...One, we already have issues for most PRs (we only don't have them for MINOR PRs)

[lidavidm]

I just moved all the completed issues into the milestone as well.