Ask HN: Are Changelogs a Must?

1 pointHalan2 comments

In a small team with well written git commits and good git history hygiene, would you still keep a changelog a la keepchangelog.com? If so why?

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Yes, by default, and in mais-ou-menos isolated consideration. Reason: Proprietary organization and especially abstraction & compilation for that purpose is de facto its own technology. It's a competitive edge especially if you can publish it for your stakeholders and customers. It also usually brings about different analysis results when seen at that level (higher level analysis leverage).

So, yes.

But...this doesn't take into account a lot of other factors that may be relevant in a given context. For example if you are overworked, or if you hate your team, or if you are moving to a new job soon anyway, or if you hate this topic, and millions of other reasons.

What benefit would a changelog bring you if you were to release up to production any change as soon as it hits main and work without long living branches? Wouldn’t it effectively be a git history?

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