Please Help: Changelog

[isaacs]

People have requested a changelog.

But I don't want to write one by hand.

Please add a script that does this, and make it easy to run automatically.

[YurySolovyov]

something like https://github.com/rvagg/changelog-maker ?

[eddiemonge]

Would you be open to having a commit message format for every commit?

[jimf]

"But I don't want to write one by hand."

Write or maintain?

[charlierudolph]

If you want to have a script that does it automatically, you need have each commit in a specific format.

If you don't want to do that, what I've done in other projects is before each release look through the commits since the last release and determine which you should let users know about (interface changes, bug fixes, new features). You could use the following command to get the commits since the last release: git log <last-version-tag>..master.

Keeping a changelog is very useful for users who would otherwise need to look through the commits and changes since the last release. A maintainer should be able to determine the relevant changes much more easily.

I doubt backfilling the changelog to the initial version is all that useful anyway, so just starting one now and adding to it with each new release would be greatly appreciated.