Developers:
Friend to friend: When you make a release please take a few minutes to make a human-readable changelog of what has changed since the last release?
Your commit-messages are not a changelog.
Let me re-iterate:
Your commit-messages are _not_ a changelog.
A changelog allows me to follow what you were thinking between releases.
A commit log shows me your keystrokes between releases.
I need to know what you were thinking.
Thank you.
@craigmaloney Obviously everyone will agree with that. That's not the issue. The issue is how to make writing release notes more practical.
@fortuna Sure. it begins by pausing for a moment and reflecting on what the release contains. Making the pause happen is the hard part since developers don't tend to want to pause. Until we get that pause and the moment of reflection there's no practical way to make it better.
@craigmaloney I believe that works well for single-person or small project but it's challenging when you need to scale to many changes and collaborators.
In that case release notes will scale better if you maintain running notes, updated when important changes happen by the authors themselves.