Publish more meaningful messages in changelogs (currently lerna)

[mbrevda]

Describe the feature

Don't publish version only updates

Use Case

When using dependency automation tools such as renovebot or dependabot, version only updates significantly increase the noise to signal ratio of package updates. This causes an extra burden for packaging maintainers, increases CI compute-related expenses, and can lead to malicious package fatigue.

Proposed Solution

Infra is apparently in place to determain which packages have changed. This can be further leveraged to opt out of publishing the unchanged packages.

Other Information

see also: #4562

Acknowledgements

• I may be able to implement this feature request
• This feature might incur a breaking change

SDK version used

latest

Environment details (OS name and version, etc.)

n/a

[kuhe]

What is an example of a version only AWS SDK JS update?

[mbrevda]

These:

[kuhe]

These versions don't contain changes directly related to these packages, but contain updates from the SDK core such that there are detailed, sometimes minor functionality differences between the versions.

The messages could perhaps say that instead of "version bump", but these releases will not be omitted.

[mbrevda]

these releases will not be omitted.

Seems that are actually changes, so it would not make sense to omit them.

sometimes minor functionality differences between the versions

In that case, perhaps it would make more sense to include the changes in core (or at least a link to them) or some other summary of what changes are causing the new version. This would be helpful when deciding whether to update a package.

[kuhe]

This wording is currently chosen by lerna, the monorepo manager. We don't currently have plans to migrate the monorepo system away from lerna, but moving to something like https://github.com/changesets/changesets may improve changelog creation.

Better changelog example from changesets: https://github.com/smithy-lang/smithy-typescript/blob/main/packages/is-array-buffer/CHANGELOG.md

[aBurmeseDev]

After internal review, we've decided not to prioritize this at this time. Our release process is tightly coupled to our automated publishing pipeline, and restructuring changelog generation would require significant effort with limited customer impact given the low engagement on this request.

For now, we recommend checking the GitHub release notes (https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-js-v3/releases) and individual PR descriptions for detailed change context. If this becomes a higher priority for the community, feel free to reopen or create a new issue with additional use cases.