Automatic changelog generation

[AlbertvanHouten]

Add logic to automatically create a changelog for new releases

[leoll2]

@AlbertvanHouten Github already offers a "Generate release notes" button when creating a new release. The auto-generated notes are basically a list of the commit messages along with the respective authors and PR. In other projects, I use the auto-generated notes as a reference, but I prefer to manually write the actual release notes to highlight what actually matters, in a language understandable by external users.

Do you have some different ideas to improve the changelog writing process?

[AlbertvanHouten]

Generate release notes might be enough in that case. This ticket was created as datumaro used to have a release notes file which required manual udpates for every single PR. This file was removed as it was too cumbersome to maintain but did not spend the time yet to look for a replacement.

[leoll2]

I absolutely agree that maintaining a changelog manually is annoying, especially if done for every PR. At the end of the day, what matters is that the release notes inform the external users about the latest changes in a digestible way. GH auto-generated notes allow some settings: https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/releasing-projects-on-github/automatically-generated-release-notes#configuring-automatically-generated-release-notes
They allow filtering PRs by labels and author; it's not very advanced, but it is already a solid base to start.