Provide manually written release notes

[MarcelBochtler]

While automatically generated release notes are easy to maintain, it is hard to get the relevant information for end users of the ORT Server.

IMO, the commit message level is too fine-grained to have readable release notes.
For a single user-facing feature, multiple commits might be required, which make the generated release notes harder to read.

The current approach doesn't give us any chance to provide more information for release notes:
The commit summary, which may outline what this commit changed, is limited to 72 characters.
The commit body, that may contain more characters, should only be used why the change is required and not repeat what was implemented because the code changes should not be repeated.
Additionally, the commit bodies are not printed in the release notes anyway.

Possible solution:
Add a release-notes.md file, which is updated by the developers after a new feature / bugfix has been fully implemented.
We might use the relevant parts of the file content for the GitHub release.
Unfortunately, this approach requires a Prepare release 0.12.0 commit, because the release version mentioned in this file has to be changed just before the release (e.g. from next to 0.12.0)

Do you have any other solutions?
Or maybe some arguments why the current approach is better for the end users?

[sschuberth]

Do you have any other solutions?

We could manually edit auto-generated release notes to add more information, which is what we did to add an "Actions Required" section to ORT releases e.g. here. That way no preparing commit is needed and notes are clearly attached to a release.

[mnonnenmacher]

Another approach is to manually edit the GitHub release after it was created and add more high-level information.