docs: Talking about the CHANGELOG

[richb-hanover]

I moved this discussion from a comment on a commit to this "Discussion"...

In 2174553#commitcomment-91295745 @richb-hanover wrote:

I see that you create the 'next version' in the CHANGELOG each time you release a version. Have you considered adding unreleased (but essentially-complete) features to the CHANGELOG? I saw this suggestion in Keep a Changelog. It has multiple benefits for this project:

• It lets people know what's "just over the horizon"
• It minimizes your effort in maintaining the CHANGELOG, since you only have to move the "unreleased" list to the Released section

@max-sixty replied:

Yes, I ask people to add something in PRs, but I haven't tried too hard to enforce that, and I'm keen to keep the overhead of making changes very low.

I think probably we move to automated changelogs from commit messages. I'm open-minded on the best way of doing that. cargo release changes has one output, but it doesn't include GH handles of contributors, which is nice to include.

If you want to find some other options for tools then please feel free! It should be very low overhead — i.e. https://changie.dev/ is too much overhead; requires running something additional for every PR.

[richb-hanover]

Now that I understand that you encourage PR's to include changes to the CHANGELOG, I will do it next time I make a PR. I would encourage the core team to start doing this - hangers-on like me will recognize that it's "the style" of the project (and that everyone has permission) to include this info.

I am not enthusiastic about automating commits->changelog. That process includes lots of cruft that hides the forest for the trees. If we wanted to do this, we could follow OpenWrt, which has a list of the interesting features of a new release (which goes into the CHANGELOG.md) plus a catalog of the commit messages (see https://openwrt.org/releases/22.03/notes-22.03.2 vs https://openwrt.org/releases/22.03/changelog-22.03.2) (I'm not suggesting we have do so much work on the detailed changelog)