Generate Your Changelog From GitHub Issues

Just my opinion, but I don't think it would be rude. Even thought I KNOW it's not really relevant, I've caught myself trusting some projects less if the Readme isn't well written.

That sort of thing happens all the time on stackoverflow, where most of the users aren't native English speakers. Go for it!

In my experience, one of the upsides of GitHub and similar services is that they drastically lower the process headache of merging patches.

When merging a patch means getting it out of the email and applying it to your branch, confirming it's valid / what changed, running your tests, then merging and pushing up the new version, it's quick to see why single-character or grammar/spelling fixes can be a burden.

With GitHub, I can see the PR, the diff, whether it'll merge cleanly, and whether my TravisCI tests pass right from the PR's page, and all I need to do is hit the Merge button. It makes me much more likely to review/merge PRs.

As a non native english speaker I would really appreciate any correction.

Yep. I know, my english is not well. So, I will much apreciate a PR with grammar fixes.

I'm a native english speaker who just happens to be a terrible speller. I consider it a measure of project success when someone who isn't a native english speaker corrects me :D

No, it's not rude. For me personally, I just think it's great that someone else was interested in the code. I would venture a guess that 95% of the ESL speakers I know just want to get better, and would love to be corrected.

It's not rude; it just ideally needs its own section or priority setting so they don't appear on par with bug fixes and the like.

I do it all the time, most people seem to like it. I usually apologize for being "that guy," though, because I don't want anyone taking it personally.

> I don't understand why a changelog is necessary nowadays. Surely all the benefits that the author addresses here could be dynamic features of Github, Gitlab, etc?

Personally, I wouldn't want to go to Github every time I download a new version of a library. Text files are fine.

I also want to make close integration with GitHub Releases. Here is an issue with details: https://github.com/skywinder/github-changelog-generator/issu...

Personally, I'm not a big fan of GitHub releases. They're not really part of my code, or my repo. They're some metadata locked inside github that doesn't carry along with the project.

A CHANGELOG.md is part of your repo/project. You can change where you host your git repos (eg: gitlab), and carry that over.

Disclaimer: I don't use changelogs either. I can't be bothered with them. Users technical enough to want to know what's been changed in such fine grained detail can use `git log --oneline`.

A generated changelog and/or a list of changes straight out of source control is not a substitute for a good release notes files. In fact, while I used to do the same in the past (back to cvsps!), I now just use the log as a template for what I'm going to write, to remember what I did.

As an user I'm not interested in source details, minor cosmetic fixes and internals. I want to know what's new compared to the last release, what are the user facing changes, and any upgrade issues I might be facing. These are usually expressed just in a few paragraphs in a very discursive fashion. I personally hate straight-form-source changelogs. I do not read them as an user (too verbose), I don't use them as a developer (I use the scm directly!).

There's a tendency for developers using git to conflate the two, since history can be rewritten. I think it's a major mistake. Commit logs are meant to aid developers. Commit logs will inevitably contain redundant information about the same logical change, even when you try hard to hide it. This is all useless information for users. On the contrary, dumbing down the history just for the sake of readability will also hurt the developers in the long run.

>Dumping a diff of commit logs. Just don’t do that, you’re helping nobody. (c)https://github.com/olivierlacan/keep-a-changelog

It's very hard to maintain it in a good maner. The Issues fits for this purpose much better. (JMHO)

Maybe you could label the issues that have been closed because they were just questions and then use the following option to exclude those issues:

  --exclude-labels  x,y,z

Hey, thats for a labels! As I mention in README: any issue, that has label "question duplicate invalid wontfix" will be excluded by default. And you can change list of this labels.

My reply below [1] talks about the pitfalls of the releaes too a bit. There's several other comments surrounding it already.

That said, I feel that changelogs are way better, being more flexible and more in control of the user. I do feel that a lot of people can't keep one that well though. We don't need fine-grained details of every internal code refactor on a major-release changelog, since it's only relevant to devs (and they'll usually see the commit logs anyway).

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9237398

Both: keeping a changelog and copying a section to the latest relase after tagging it, since they're both Markdown.

I will add this feature in the future to this script also! https://github.com/skywinder/github-changelog-generator/issu...