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Ask HN: How do you automate your release notes?

7 points by dustfinger

by effnorwood

0 subcomment

Claude - write some plausible release notes that management will buy but make no actual sense and save it as xml.

by cpburns2009

2 subcomments

All I can say is I hate when projects just lazily list every pull request for its change log / release notes. It makes it very difficult to discover what breaking changes there are.

by insin

1 subcomments

I add release notes to a draft Markdown file in the same commit as every change, under the appropriate Breaking / Changes etc. heading, so when I'm ready to release that becomes the next release notes.
I've never seen an auto-generated set of release notes I liked, a list of PRs doesn't cut it.

by nitwit005

1 subcomments

We have our release notes fully automated from git tags, and it's unfortunately useless as people don't actually the right tags on things, so everyone ends up manually editing it.

by weinzierl

1 subcomments

Unpopular opinions:
1. Release notes should never be created mechanically but focus on the consumer of the release.
2. The best changelog is your git. It is OK to generate a calcified changelog for an audience that prefers that.
Last and least:
3. The commit messages are a private space where developers communicate. The messages should never end up at the customer without thorough filtering and distillation.
Apart from that: git-cliff is excellent. If you must generate a document from commits, use that.