Changelog and releases with Release Drafter

[anoymouserver]

As a follow-up for #993 (comment) and #1032 ..

If we want to use it and it covers all our use cases, we would need to use individual tags for each PR to make it work, since PRs/commits are not included without them (noticed it on my last commit).
The Release Drafter config would then need to be extended with the other tags (API, Frontend, dependencies,...).

After this we probably could deprecate the Changelog enforcer, since the changelog will be created automatically based on the tags.

I've seen it work for most of the Jenkins plugins (e.g. the SSH Build Agents or Static Analysis Model).

[Grotax]

Yea true, I thought we would just start working with it. We still need an action that updates the changelog file as that is read by the appstore.
But I bet there is one that can do that same like the drafter.

[Grotax]

The GitHub release notes are basically a nice extra for users that want to look at the releases.
For the nextcloud universe it doesn't matter.

[anoymouserver]

How happy are you with it in general?
What does the appstore need the CHANGELOG.md for and could it possibly be switched to https://github.com/nextcloud/news/releases or https://github.com/nextcloud/news/releases/latest?

[Grotax]

In general, pretty nice allows for a manual approval but prepares everything and works nicely with the existing action.

The CHANGELOG.md is parsed by the appstore as you can see here: https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/news/releases?platform=21#21
It also squashes rc1, rc2 into the final release, it's not smart enough to merge the headers but hey at least the info is there.

I don't think we can switch to the releases, although I think that would be in general a nice feature. But the appstore development seems pretty dead at the moment, I wonder how that will continue in the future.

[anoymouserver]

Oh interesting, I've never seen this page. In the past I've always looked at the releases or the repository, and now I'm more involved and notice it even earlier. 😃

If you have contact to one of the appstore maintainers (or anyone else in the direct NC org) you could suggest this to them, as I think it would also help some other app maintainers.

If you want I can try to extend the drafter config so that it covers our main cases.

[Grotax]

The appstore is also just a GitHub project https://github.com/nextcloud/appstore it's written in python an based on Django.
If you look at the last release it was in Nov. 2018 there have been some pr merges back in April and May 2020 but most commits are from transifex. I'm not sure if it currently has a Maintainer.

If you want I can try to extend the drafter config so that it covers our main cases.
Sure go ahead :)

[Grotax]

Based on the latest release I created #1037 which should make the manual sorting already easier

[anoymouserver]

I would also add the following (but it makes the dependencies block useless with the current dependabot config).

exclude-labels:
  - Skip-Changelog

— @anoymouserver

True I guess we could add a dependabot label, that frees it from the Changelog enforcer for now
In the future I would like to have an action that takes the PR title and adds it to the changelog same as the drafter does it for github, if thats possible

— @Grotax

We should probably add some action which enforces certain labels for merged PRs, so they are grouped correctly into the draft release.
These than need to be included into the release-drafter.yml.
An exclude rule is also likely necessary if we don't wan't to sort out unneeded PRs for the changelog.

[Grotax]

Yes I agree 👍