Enhanced changelogs?

[maximlt]

Hey all!

I'm a HoloViz contributor and we make heavy use of this theme, building about 10 websites with it 🙏 I regularly check the changelog of new versions of the theme to see how that might impact our configuration and websites. I have to say that I find the current changelog format quite difficult to parse, it mixes different kinds of changes (bug fixes, enhancements, maintenance, etc.) and includes changes that aren't that relevant to downstream users like us (e.g. pre-commit). I would like to kindly ask if you could produce changelogs a bit more readable and written for users of the theme like it used to be for earlier versions https://github.com/pydata/pydata-sphinx-theme/releases/tag/v0.14.2? 🙂 Oh and I know too well they're a bit of a pain to write as we try to do that in HoloViz (e.g. https://github.com/holoviz/hvplot/releases/tag/v0.11.0), I'm quite sure it's worth the pain though!

[12rambau]

What I was doing when creating the changelog was generating the complete changelog automatically from GitHub and then edit the file and sort the commits by theme. depending on the length of the release it was ok. At some point I suggested to use a naming convention like conventional comits for the PR (as they become the commit name once squashed). It would have made the sorting exercise easier but I didn't fight much for it.

[maximlt]

generating the complete changelog automatically from GitHub and then edit the file and sort the commits by theme

Yep, this is also exactly how we do it.

At some point I suggested to use a naming convention like conventional comits for the PR (as they become the commit name once squashed). It would have made the sorting exercise easier but I didn't fight much for it.

That could slightly improve things, though in my mind it's a system that works well only if everyone is very rigorous about the content of their PR and the PR conventional commit plus title. If not, I guess this just produces a seemingly well-organized, messy changelog 😄

[12rambau]

That could slightly improve things, though in my mind it's a system that works well only if everyone is very rigorous about the content of their PR and the PR conventional commit plus title. If not, I guess this just produces a seemingly well-organized, messy changelog 😄

The repository is very rigorous in it's commit as everything that goes to main is squashed and named as the PR title by the maintainers. It's just an habbit of renaming the PRs name when they come in, once you get the trend it's very natural

[trallard]

We can make sure to improve the Changelog entries.

I was in charge of this last release, and since I did it just before my annual leave, I did not have a lot of time to iron out some details, so I am sorry.

[maximlt]

Hey thanks for your answer @trallard! And no need to be sorry :)