Maintain a CHANGELOG.md file?

[me-diru]

Hello all, as brought up in the latest spin meeting. Maintaining a CHAGELOG.md file would be a good idea to let the users add their contributions under specific tags (documentation, feature, bugfix, etc) in a single file and put it in consolidated human-readable form.

This will have a two-fold impact:

• Lessen the load for the person doing a new Spin release to go through all the commits and summarize them manually
• A sense of inclusivity to contributors with their names attached as part of the release and being in CHANGELOG

[me-diru]

cc: @vdice @itowlson

[itowlson]

I don't have an opinion on the existence of the file, but I have some concerns about requiring contributors to maintain it as they go:

1. We already have a bunch of hoops to jump through. "Can you sign your commits please? Would you mind running cargo fmt/clippy to get the lints green? Oops you also need to GPG sign, can you do that please?" I would be wary of adding "Can you add an entry to the change log please?" to that list.
2. Writing clear, grammatical, correctly spelled documentation is hard. It is not something we can or should require of our contributors. Of course, reviewers can work with the PR author on the text or tweak it after the fact! But that feels a bit back to project staff maintaining the changelog, only having to keep context-switching in and out, instead of having a focused session putting the story together. (Or maybe this is a single pass at release time, using the skeleton of existing entries. That feels more workable.)

I'm sure other projects have tried this, so we can hopefully learn from them how they make it work and follow those models! These are just my instinctive worries without having more detail on the process.