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Dependabot and Renovate shows wrong changelog info

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#1,048 3 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
java
Domain
build-system

Research direction

Start by examining how the spotless-maven-plugin publishes its changelog and metadata, especially CHANGES.md, and compare that with the Dependabot example in pull request 8480. The work is done when Dependabot and Renovate update pull requests show the plugin's own changelog, commits, and correct changelog source rather than the root project's information.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

bug

Many projects use dependabot to manage version updates of dependencies. It helps them to keep up to date with new versions, but also to understand what changed between versions. When a new version is available, a pull request with the related change is created. It's body (i.e. description) contains a changelog and list of commits between the different versions. For spotless-maven-plugin this does not work correctly, because it uses the changelog and commits of the root project.

For example https://github.com/camunda-cloud/zeebe/pull/8480 shows that it updates spotless-maven-plugin from 2.17.7 to 2.18.0, but the changelog shows the changes of the root project up to version 2.18.0, instead of the changes of the maven-plugin. In addition, its shows the wrong changelog as source:

Sourced from spotless-maven-plugin's changelog

Looking at the dependabot issues about changelog, this seems to be a common problem. However, it also looks like the dependabot team does not intend to change anything for it. So, I think spotless should improve its setup to correct dependabot's failure to deal with this, because it would help existing users of spotless, to learn about the changes in new versions.

Dominant language
Java
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Forks
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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