Generate HISTORY.md

[astorije]

Now that Specberus is on npm, publishing a new version is simply a matter of running npm version (major|minor|patch).

That'd be even better if this command (or an additional one, if necessary) would generate a HISTORY.md file based on the git history. Some of those out there really look alike and I am wondering if it exists a cool tool to do that. I very quickly looked for one myself for a personal project without any success.

@darobin, would you be aware of anything?

[darobin]

I know there are tools that do this, I've seen people talk about them, but I don't remember what they're called. I never read the history (or if I need to I just read the commit log) so I never paid much attention to this.

[astorije]

Well, if you happen to remember some names, that'd be helpful :)
Too bad the tag/release view on GitHub doesn't let us view the according commits between 2 tags for example (when tags happen to be on the same branch).

[tripu]

Getting this automated history of changes, based on Git log, would be good, no doubt.

However, I find that dumping git log generates a dry, robotic changelog, and there would be too much noise, with cryptic or irrelevant commits. What I'd like to show users of the system (and what I like to see often as a user) is more a human-readable, generic account of changes. That should include things that git log won't show, eg “we edited the wiki to reflect this and that”, including hyperlinks to relevant resources. In a word, it's the changelog I'd like to read on a message to a mailing list.

So, this issue is worth investigating — but I think there's still a good case to be made for “manual” changelogs from time to time, like the last one I suggested for Echidna.

[astorije]

Understandable, but wiki editions are separate from the system. Reporting this as a change on the system's version is bit awkward IMO. When there is a change in the wiki that reflects a change in the system however, then the commits will show then anyway. And it also forces one to submit relevant commit messages, which is a good thing because no one wants cryptic commit messages anyway.

There might be an in-between version of this, because again this is speculative as I haven't found a solution so far.

However, 👎 to an HTML version in the index and 👍 to a separate Markdown file.

[marcoscaceres]

I've been using this for ReSpec:
https://github.com/skywinder/github-changelog-generator

It's pretty good. E.g.,:
https://github.com/w3c/respec/blob/develop/CHANGELOG.md

There might be better tools tho.

[tripu]

Hum, that is nice, @marcoscaceres.

[marcoscaceres]

You should check for other ones too. I'm going to try to dig up some based on semver. I'm using this one on a different project:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/standard-version

I only just started using that one above, but here is some output:
https://github.com/WICG/starter-kit/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md

[marcoscaceres]

I use "standard-version" because it's NPM compatible. The github-log-generator is not on NPM, which kinda sucks.