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Planned features

Not all of these features/ideas will (or should!) be implemented but this is an idea of where I want to take the project in the future.

Items marked with:

  • 🔥 Should be implemented as a priority before the next minor release (patch or bug-fixes are ok as needed).
  • 🚀 Has been already implemented in the main repo and will be included in the next release.

Features to Add

  • Add a list of releases that should be ignored.
  • Allow ignoring all alpha/beta releases and merge their changes into the next full release of the same version (or just the next release).
  • Allowing some sort of merging of releases, e.g. all beta releases PR are listed with the latest 'un merged' release. or, more simply, a list of releases to ignore so that their PR's are added to the next release up's notes.
  • Allow setting a different last release to compare to for release links, in the case that releases are out of order.
  • Allow the extend_sections option to use a regex on the PR title in addition to just matching on the label.
  • Allow custom ordering of sections.
  • Allow custom output formats (e.g. HTML, PDF, etc.) in addition to the default Markdown.
  • Add ability to create a new draft release on GitHub with the latest changelog text as the body.
  • For the --contrib option, allow to use an existing file with comment markers in the file to indicate where to add the names. Provide a default file with the comment markers in it or just document the process?
  • If there is no local config file, check for a global config file in the user's home directory. This would allow a user to set their GitHub PAT once and use it for all projects. [Probably needs to be done in the settings package]
  • Add settings to run this as a GitHub action, so it can be run automatically when a new release is created or a PR is merged. We should be able to use the secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN for this?
  • Option to start at a specific release, ignoring all previous releases.
  • Once the common config file functionality is implemented, add the ability to read the config from a pyproject.toml file if it exists in the current directory. This will allow one less config file. Note that the PAT will still need to be set manually in the local or global config file to aviod it getting added to the repo so this has limited usefulness. Can always get the PAT from a local secret file or environment variable.
  • Add option to specify the GitHub PAT from the command line, eg --token <PAT>. This will override any PAT set in the config file. Note that this can be a security risk if the PAT is visible in the command history, so it should be used with caution. [This needs the settings logic to be refactored first, the way it is done at the moment it will still ask for the PAT if it is not set in the config file, even if it is set on the command line, since this is a side-effect of importing the settings library.]
  • Offer to create any missing GitHub labels for the repo. This will prob require adding extra permissions to the PAT.
  • Allow to use Git TAGS instead of GitHub Releases to generate the changelog. some projects don't use GitHub releases, but do use tags.

Improve existing functionality

  • Allow multiple labels to be used for the same section, eg 'enhancement' and 'new_feature' both map to the 'Enhancements' section.
  • Perhaps rename the Enhancements section to New Features or similar? I do this in my own projects anyway.
  • If the tool is run in a local repo, use that for the --contrib functionality instead of the GitHub API. This should be an order of magnitude faster. Have an opt-out option to use the GitHub API instead.
  • Update the format for custom sections to allow each section to have it's own insertion index. This will be a breaking change in the config file format so require a schema_version bump. [This will not be needed if the option for custom ordering of sections is implemented, it can be folded into that.]
  • Add option to use Markdown header levels for the section headings instead of the default bold text. This is more correct for Markdown and will pass linters.
  • Add an option in the individual changelog_generator.release_text sections to hide the title for that release.

Known Issues

  • Some version numbers in PRs (especially dependabot) get mis-identified as emojis in the output, especially if the version number contains <3 which gives ❤ in certain viewers (though this does NOT happen in GitHub or MkDocs at least). This is very obvious for 'pip' version numbers. It's not a priority to fix this for it's intended usage, but just for completeness.
  • When using the Release body, we need to normalize any headings to Bold text instead so it does not grate so badly with the auto-generated headings.
  • In some cases the full-changelog does not get removed from the existing body properly depending on how it is formatted.
  • For closed issues, if there are no issues after filtering (for example if the only issue has the ignore label) the heading is still shown.

Refactoring

  • The whole code base needs a bit of refactoring to tidy the code and remove some of the duplication. This is a low priority but should be done at some point. Priority to the actual 'ChangeLog' class. Preferably this should wait until we have full test coverage.

Documentation

  • The table styling under mobile looks a bit squashed due to setting the width to 100% for better desktop display. Need to add a media query to set the width better for mobile, prob using overflow

Testing

  • Complete testing with pytest to 100% or as close as possible.
  • The whole test_changelog.py file needs to be re-written and find a better way to deal with missing options.

Back Burner

These are ideas that I have had but are not really a priority at the moment, were partially deprecated by other functionality, or I'm not sure if they are even a good idea.

Moving them here to prune the main list down to things that are more likely to be implemented.

  • Ability to only update changes and leave the rest of the file untouched (ie do not re-generate previous releases, only new ones or the unreleased section). (allows user customization to the CHANGELOG). [Since adding the ability to include arbitrary text, hide releases and PRs, this is probably not worth the effort it would take]
  • Add support for generating changelogs for specific time periods (e.g. last week, last month, etc.) [More like something would be in a repo analysis tool not a changelog generator]
  • Add support for generating changelogs for specific contributors, authors or teams. [As above]
  • option to just have a flat list of PRs and Issues with no sections. [Would be ugly and limited usefulness]
  • Add some form of text block to the oldest release that says something like "First release" or "Initial release" or "Initial commit" or something (configurable) to indicate that this is the first release and nothing to compare to. Optionally hide all PR, Issue and commit links in this release. [Easily done using the 'release_overrides' option.]
  • Set up versioned documentation on GitHub pages using 'mike' in conjunction with MkDocs. I'd like to have an 'unreleased' branch to show ongoing docs for the upcoming versions if possible. See the mkdocs-material versioning page on this subject. [Honestly, I can't be bothered with this. I don't see the point of versioned docs for a tool like this. Just use the latest version and docs]
  • Dump markdown code for a specific release to the terminal, so it can be copy / pasted into other docs.

Other

  • Break out the --contrib option into a separate standalone project that can be used to generate a list of contributors for any project directly from a local repository. This will be useful for projects that don't use GitHub. Can be made into a GitHub action too.
  • Offer standalone binaries for Windows, MacOS and Linux. This will allow users to install the tool without having to install Python first. This will be especially useful for Windows users. This will require using pyinstaller or similar to create the binaries. Can probably be done with GitHub actions.