Hints/guidance when raising a PR and updating changelog

[mikekryjak]

Hypnotoad has a super neat feature set up. If you open a new PR, it has this default text inside:

This is going to be exceptionally useful to new developers. We should do it.

What's also really nice is that each PR needs you to update the release changelog yourself. I think this is a great idea because we'll then have a running changelog for anyone to see instead of @bendudson compiling it manually upon release.

[johnomotani]

What's also really nice is that each PR needs you to update the release changelog yourself. I think this is a great idea because we'll then have a running changelog for anyone to see instead of @bendudson compiling it manually upon release.

This actually gets to be a bit of a pain to maintain. My preferred option now would be to use a nice Github feature - when you make a release, you can auto-generate release notes that list all the PRs that were merged since the last release (with links). As long as your PRs have descriptive titles, this works well and is much less annoying to maintain than the manual changelog file (the feature didn't exist when I first copied the changelog file idea from xarray!).

[ZedThree]

For BOUT++, we have a tool that does the same thing as the GitHub release, collecting all the PR titles and putting them in CHANGELOG.md

[bendudson]

For Hermes-3 releases I just use the Github auto-generated summary, sometimes with minor adjustments.