Keeping a nice changelog

[mhauru]

@seabbs pointed out that it could be helpful to have a place to check changes in recent versions. I think @penelopeysm recently mentioned something similar, about how it could be good practice to type some human-readable change notes at least for all breaking releases. I think this could be a good idea, have them as part of GitHub releases if nothing else. An example of how epinowcast is doing theirs: https://package.epinowcast.org/news/index.html

[penelopeysm]

If you trigger JuliaRegistrator with release notes, it gets automatically added to the github release, I did this for the two latest versions of DynamicPPL: https://github.com/TuringLang/DynamicPPL.jl/releases

[penelopeysm]

Slightly frustratingly, JuliaRegistrator expects a really precise format for the release notes that is (as far as I know) not documented. For minor version bumps it has to look like this

@JuliaRegistrator register

Release notes:

## Breaking changes

- Foo
- Bar

[JuliaRegistrator]

Registration pull request created: JuliaRegistries/General/122924

Tagging

After the above pull request is merged, it is recommended that a tag is created on this repository for the registered package version.

This will be done automatically if the Julia TagBot GitHub Action is installed, or can be done manually through the github interface, or via:

git tag -a v0.36.0 -m "<description of version>" 7d6f8ed53b59047c86fb1c09c9d593ca30250a60
git push origin v0.36.0

[penelopeysm]

Oh, for goodness' sake.

[mhauru]

Hahaha, it's so eager to help.

@seabbs also pointed out that having one centralised place for all the packages in the ecosystem might be good. Maybe an autogenerated page of turinglang.org that lists all new releases of all of our packages?

[penelopeysm]

I think that's this TuringLang/turinglang.github.io#104

[seabbs]

Love the bot fighting back here. In terms of a central place I meant a single place for release notes/turing news etc kind of like this https://www.tidyverse.org/blog/ its a big effort though and we don't do a good job of it in epinowcast land (i.e we did it once for one package https://www.epinowcast.org/blog.html).

[penelopeysm]

That would be really cool. I know there was some kind of attempt at having a blog https://turinglang.org/news/ but that predates our time on the project