Missing release documentation or change log

[tenkiller]

Since v5.4.0, there have been no documented releases or an added CHANGELOG. This repo is on v5.5.2 apparently with no mention of added features, optimizations, or breaking changes. Am I missing something? I do not have the time to sift through commits to discern what changed. I cannot comfortably upgrade from v5.4.0 without it. What happened?

[pokoli]

Nobody contributed the documentation. @tenkiller Could you please have a log at the commmit history and write them down?
We just need the documentation for 5.5 relaease as we do not document bug fixes release.

[tenkiller]

@pokoli You documented release v5.4.0. I'm confused about why you didn't do the same for every release afterwards? You made most of the commits yourself.

[pokoli]

@tenkiller Maintainer's life is hard sometimes, so one needs to priorize.

TBH If you are really interested on having the CHANGELOG it will be great to contribute it back helping the project.
I do not think it will take more time to write them than the one you already invested here complaining.

If you want something done well, do it yourself.

[tenkiller]

I understand that maintaining an open source project well is hard. And it's unfortunate you think what I'm asking for is "complaining." I believe it's commonplace to have such an expectation for a popular package downloaded millions of times a week. If you're going to take the time to push and publish a change to the repo, I don't think it's too much to ask to click a button to create a new Release in Github and click another button to Generate Release Notes. 🤷‍♂

[pokoli]

@tenkiller Release notes are not generated, they are written by people (normally maintainers).
If you take the effort to write them down, then I will click the new Release button and include them.
If you do nothing to fix the issue, you are just complaining.

This is my last message in the issue, if you do not make any effort I will not do any effort to answer your compalints.

[tenkiller]

You and I do not agree. That's fair. You chose to maintain this project, not me. Taking an adversarial tone with anyone that questions you isn't a good sign for the future of this project. Maybe you should do better. Good luck to you. 👋

[mark-monteiro]

@pokoli Makes sense, writing changelogs can be pretty tedious.

Do you think you could at least update the release process so that a release is created on GitHub in https://github.com/mholt/PapaParse/releases. This could be created even without release notes at all. This would be helpful so that people can see the correct latest version from the project home page on GitHub (currently it shows 5.4.0 as the latest release, which is incorrect).

Some quick boilerplate text as the release notes would also be helpful, something like this that takes not much effort to add but is still useful:

This is a bugfix-only release. See the commit history for changes: https://github.com/mholt/PapaParse/compare/5.4.0...5.4.1

[pokoli]

@mark-monteiro I do no think it makes sense to create a release for bugfix only releases.

For other releases I think we should document what is included in the new series. At list this is what I'm trying to do for each published release.

[tenkiller]

I do no think it makes sense to create a release for bugfix only releases.

Why is officially telling millions of users you fixed a bug in a new published version not important to you? How much do you know about release management?

I think we should document what is included in the new series. At list this is what I'm trying to do for each published release.

Document all changes. It's not hard. It takes less time to create a new release and generate the release notes than the total amount of time it has taken for you to argue against it. @pokoli

[pokoli]

@tenkiller Do no blame me for not caring about documentation when after more than one month of opening this issue you did not provide any help to improve the situation.

Before asking others to work for your, you should consider spending your time in improving the situation instead of arguing against me and making everybode lose their time.

[tenkiller]

Do no blame me for not caring

I do.

[gabegorelick]

@pokoli I appreciate your effort to get releases out in a timely manner and certainly understand that getting releases out often takes priority over documenting them. To help you out, would you be interested in some sort of automated release process that could publish a tag and add an autogenerated entry to the Changelog? I can potentially help with that.

Even just pushing tags would be useful to see at a glance what the latest version is:

Changelog entries could default to a list of commits/PRs since the previous release. There are a lot of projects that do that when more prose isn't warranted.

[pokoli]

@gabegorelick yes, any automatted script will be welcome!

[bdbch]

I highly recommend using https://github.com/changesets/changesets for bumping your semver version + creating well documented changelogs.