[Proposal] Create a changelog to track releases over time

[tmarkley]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

We currently (i.e. for v1.0.0) generate release notes for each release, but changelogs are often easier to parse/search when dealing with version bumps/upgrades than individual release notes. Having a complete summary of breaking changes, new features, etc. between all previous versions is incredibly useful.

Describe the solution you'd like

We could use something like this to aid in the generation: https://github.com/github-changelog-generator/github-changelog-generator

Describe alternatives you've considered

Some potential alternatives:

• https://github.com/CookPete/auto-changelog
• https://github.com/git-chglog/git-chglog
• https://github.com/semantic-release/semantic-release
• https://github.com/conventional-changelog/standard-version

Additional context

A great example is mocha, where they include the version number, date, sections in each release, and emojis (a fun bonus feature): https://github.com/mochajs/mocha/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md

I also added a comment in the OpenSearch repo with this suggestion: https://github.com/opensearch-project/OpenSearch/issues/789#issuecomment-871675956

[galangel]

Good suggestion

[dblock]

+1, and I would want this to be in https://keepachangelog.com/en/1.0.0/ format

A stretch idea would be to both enforce the format and require changelog entries on PRs, thus not needing to do any work for releases notes before releases. I use https://github.com/dblock/danger-changelog for this.

[zhongnansu]

Change log makes auto backport PRs fail a lot, since all PRs now will touch the same file CHANGELOG.md, and the chance of a conflict becomes higher.

[joshuarrrr]

closing this proposal, as most of the suggestions have been implemented, albeit at significant cost to developers and maintainers.