Publishing Changelogs
A user filed a bug against my memcached client because he couldn’t find the changelog and wanted to know what went into the new version.
I have a decent structure around releases, especially with this project. I tag it and write a good summary of changes in the tag including an abbreviated shortlog output, then I send the same out to the mailing list.
Somehow, I expected anyone not on the mailing list to just dig through my tags to find out what’s changed. I suppose that’s asking quite a bit.
Since I’ve been keeping good information in my tags since moving over to git (which actually has proper tag objects), I’ve found it quite easy to automate this process. My new git htmlchangelog takes a list of tags and generates a reasonable changelog automatically from this.
For example, the following command:
git htmlchangelog `git tag | egrep -v pre\|rc` > changelog.html
created the changelog for my memcached client.
