Support for creating changelogs for multiple milestones

[odrotbohm]

When creating an x.0 GA release, it would be nice if there was an easy way to create a unified changelog including all milestones and release candidates, i.e. a changelog from multiple milestones.

Do you think the milestone title could be interpreted as a comma-separated list, so that one can pass "4.0.0,4.0.0-RC1,…" into it?

[philwebb]

I think it should be possible, my only concern would be if the GitHub API has any restrictions to reading data from the earlier closed milestones.

[snicoll]

How are we going to present dependency upgrades in the merged view? If a feature release, for instance, upgrades to a new milestone of Spring Framework, then the consolidated view will mention an upgrade to Framework X.Y.Z-M1, X.Y.Z-M2, X.Y.Z-M3, X.Y.Z-RC1, X.Y.Z. That's not very helpful IMO.

Besides, I am not aware (unfortunately) of any standard with regards to the issue title of dependency upgrades. Spring Boot uses "Upgrade to ". Without such a signal, any smart merging would be hard to implement correctly. Depending of the project, a third-party lib may also be updated quite often during the milestones phase.

Another issue is things that we did in an earlier milestone and that we decided to revert or change significantly in a later milestone. This happens from time to time and, when we consolidate the release notes, we have to be careful not to advertize something that actually isn't there anymore.

Wouldn't a link to each release notes be more pragmatic? A bullet list at the top with each entry being a link to the changelog of an intermediate milestone.

[wilkinsona]

How are we going to present dependency upgrades in the merged view?

I'm not sure that @odrotbohm is necessarily proposing that the content is merged together. Linking is one alternative, another is to keep the content separated by milestone but present it all on a single page.

Possible options:

• Link to earlier change logs
• Include the changelogs for other milestones beneath the content for the current milestone
• Merge all of the content together into a single changelog

Linking and including have pretty similar end results – it's largely just single-page vs multi-page format. Both present information in a way that's useful to those who want to know the delta between two milestones and those who want to know about everything that's in a new minor or major.

Merging content is quite different. First, I think it would be really hard to do well in an automated fashion. Second, the end result would not meet the needs of someone who wants to see what's changed from one milestone to the next.