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Changelogs and Tags

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#197 1 comment 3 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
elixir, git, github
Domain
documentation, release

Research direction

Start with CHANGELOG.md and the release tags referenced in the issue, then review how versions are published and represented on GitHub. The work is done when releases such as 3.3.2 and 3.3.3 can be identified and compared clearly, with up-to-date changelog information for consumers.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Hello there 👋🏼

This is a general request related to the project's changelog, tags, releases, etc. — I'll explain it in narrative form and offer some suggestions of how the maintainers of the library could make my life easier as a consumer.

tl;dr A detailed and up-to-date changelog, and/or tags for all releases, would be very helpful! I understand that library maintenance is extremely time-consuming, but as a consumer, I'm unqualified to determine whether updating this package will break my application.

Today I noticed one of our application's dependencies is using a retired version, so it's time to do a round of updates. I usually do patch package updates at the same time for efficiency. This library has an available update:

# mix hex.outdated
libcluster              3.3.2       3.3.3       Update possible

That's a patch update, so chances are it won't break anything, but I always read the changelog to be sure!

Unfortunately, it doesn't have clearly-labeled information about the past three releases:

# Changelog

## Unreleased

- Use new cypher names
- Allow Epmd strategy to reconnect after connection failures
- Detect Self Signed Certificate Authority for Kubernetes Strategy
- Remove calls to deprecated `Logger.warn/2`

### 3.3.0

...

In this situation, I fall back to manually reading the changes because Elixir is (in my opinion) relatively easy to read. So we're interested in the changes between the 3.3.2 and 3.3.3 releases. The releases page is my usual way of doing this: (1) find the 3.3.3 tag and click on it, (2) use the Compare option in the left, and (3) choose the 3.3.2 tag. Thanks to GitHub auto-generating releases for all tags, this usually works even if the maintainer didn't create a formal release on GitHub with notes.

Unfortunately, the older release doesn't have a tag:

image

That's unfortunate, so we'll have to find the commit that represents the 3.3.2 release manually and use my knowledge of GitHub URLs to create a comparison between that commit and the latest tag. However, when we look at the commits, there's no indication of which one relates to the release:

image

Perhaps the 3.3.1 commit/tag is the same, and that's why this situation occurred. That would be fine, but unfortunately this is opaque to me as a consumer.

This incident isn't big enough to be worth posting about, but it has occurred a few times now. I can say with certainty that the maintainers of this library are by far smarter and harder-working than me. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to use the fruits of this labor because of release-related documentation. ❤️

Dominant language
Elixir
Stars
2.2k
Forks
202
No merged PRs in 30d

Getting set up

  • No Dockerfile or Docker Compose file
  • Has a pull request template
  • No contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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