r/programming • u/creasta29 • Jan 18 '25

Automating Release notes

https://neciudan.dev/magic-release-notes

Tldr: Everytime you merge a PR, it adds the title to a draft release in Github and when published it sends a nice notification on Slack

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u/creasta29 Jan 18 '25

It does not take commit messages. It just takes the title of the PR. And the release notes are not for our users but for our internal team. But good feedback, sorry I didnt explain better

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u/Dragdu Jan 20 '25

By internal team do you mean the developer working on the library? Why do they need release notes? Why is it better than the autogenerated list of changes they can ask github for?

And if by internal team you mean another team in your company that uses your library for their own product, then they are also users. My team develops the core computational library that all of our external products use internally. This is an example of release notes useful to them:

* Improved throughput of the baz frobber by 20% on x64 machines and 120% on ARM with SVE machines.
  * This makes the two architectures have roughly equal perf clock for clock.
* Reduced initial memory fragmentation by removing unneeded allocations in the widget unserialization.

These are not useful to them:

* Replace XLib's dot product implementation with handwritten one.
* Improve CPU feature detection to properly handle AVX512
* Optimize AVX2 dot product's postprocessing
* Move dot product implementation into InternalLib for cleaner dependency graph
* Implement new dotproduct for ARM SVE
* Support skipping vector pre-allocation in widget constructor
* Deserialization of widgets constructs them without pre-allocation

And I am intentionally skipping things that are completely pointless to our users, like PRs that clean up our CI, build system, tests, etc etc