[Development] Maintainers, your action needed: Qt 5.12.2 changes files

[Shawn Rutledge]

> On 21 Feb 2019, at 12:47, Cristián Maureira-Fredes <Cristian.Maureira-Fredes at qt.io> wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> so, we agree the Go one (qtqa) is the recommended one?
> 
> Time ago, I was directed to this one: http://code.qt.io/cgit/qtsdk/qtsdk.git/tree/packaging-tools/create_changelog.pl
> and ended up suggesting this one as a replacement for the Qt for Python project: https://codereview.qt-project.org/#/c/252162/
> 
> I understand it is better to focus on one script and improve it so that's why I would like to know
> which is the preferred option.

I wanted to automate the manual work I’d been doing for every release to get most of the bug fixes listed in the changelog (including those which don’t have changelog entries in the commit message); and I’d rather write Go than Perl, so I did a couple of patches on that tool.  (The last change is just now integrated.)  It works for me, but it intentionally strays on the side of “too much information.”  It combines the git commit message with the Jira bug description, so those entries always needs editing to get a concise changelog message.  For me that’s fine, because neither Jira bug descriptions nor commit messages are written in the right style for a changelog, but at least all the information gets into the file so that I don’t have to individually look up bugs on Jira to find out what certain changes were really about (as long as the subject is descriptive enough).

So I don’t know if every maintainer would like to work that way; maybe some would rather stray on the side of having the generation mostly automated and not adding every bug fix?  But in practice it seems e.g. the qtbase changelog has always needed plenty of manual editing.  So having the changelog a bit rough at first won’t be any more work than what’s been going on.

https://codereview.qt-project.org/#/c/253930/ PS2 is currently showing exactly the output of this tool, so you can compare PS1 to PS2 to see the difference.

The boilerplate does need a little work.  So far I didn’t think we would actually use this tool for the whole log, I just wanted to use it to get some more entries to blend into the existing log.  But if we want to use it for real, fixing it up a little more won’t be hard.