Marcin Koculak (Sep 01 2025 at 19:43): Marcin Koculak (Sep 01 2025 at 19:43):So I have no experience with publishing packages, I managed to register my first one half a year ago, now I would want to release a new version along with meaningful release notes and a NEWS.md or CHANGELOG.md file to keep track of these over time.
For now I get that new releases work like registration (so tagging tagbot in the last commit for the release) and I got that I can write the release notes in the same commit, but how to combine it with a markdown file inside a repo?
Is there a general preference whether it should be NEWS or CHANGELOG in julialand?
And on top of that, is there a way to then include this in the documenter docs?
Are there automations available to sync all of this?
Joshua Lampert (Sep 01 2025 at 19:46):Regarding how to include the changelog automatically in the docs, there is Changelog.jl.
Joshua Lampert (Sep 01 2025 at 19:47):Whether to call the file NEWS.md or CHANGELOG.md, I don't know if there is a preferred way, but I see both.
Marcin Koculak (Sep 01 2025 at 19:51):Yes, I have seen the package, but was not sure how common is its usage.
I was trying to figure out was is the typical strategy for julia packages, but from repos alone one can't figure it out, right?
I was kinda expecting it all somehow happens behind the scenes with github actions.
I am also going through this discourse thread but it mostly points to Registrator readme which does not have a lot of answers.
Sascha Mann (Sep 01 2025 at 20:18):GitHub has some built-in features for automatically generating release notes based on repo activity which you could use to generate the markdown and there's a popular github action for it, too: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/release-drafter
I'm not sure if there's an option to write it to a file but it wouldn't be too hard to add a workflow that does this
Sascha Mann (Sep 01 2025 at 20:18):That said, I personally feel like there's a benefit to having 'handcrafted' changelogs as auto-generated changelogs tend to have a lot of noise that's probably not overly relevant to most users
Marcin Koculak (Sep 02 2025 at 12:21):True, I guess a list of merged pull requests and closed issues is better than nothing, but having just that is terrible. Ideally, I would just want to handcraft one file that gets distributed to docs and release notes.
Actually reading (rather than skimming) the readme for Changelog.jl allowed me to realise it can create the docs page (and found that IJulia.jl is an example repo that uses it). So that's great.
The other piece was actually proposed and prototyped two years ago. Sadly not finished. Temporary solution is to just manually copy it to the registrator commit, so all three places have the same info.
Maybe after some time I'll have the time and skill to help finish that draft.
Jakob Peters (Sep 04 2025 at 05:09):I have both a NEWS.md and HISTORY.md. All updates for the latest release go into news. As soon as that version is released, the news becomes history. When releasing with JuliaRegistrator, I point a link to that tag's news.
Neven Sajko (Sep 05 2025 at 17:11):https://github.com/googleapis/release-please/issues/2152
A linked PR from two months ago is supposed to add the feature. No conflicts yet.
Neven Sajko (Sep 05 2025 at 17:12):Last updated: Sep 07 2025 at 04:39 UTC