Feedback request: Mentioning contributors in Jenkins core changelogs

[Oleg Nenashev]

Hi all,

I would like to improve the Jenkins core contributor recognition a bit and to add mentioning of contributors in the weekly and LTS changelogs. We already add contributors to plugin/tool changeloigs generated by Release Drafter, and it looks to be a great way to highlight contributors and to get them participating more in the Jenkins project. 

Before we proceed with such change, it would be great to get feedback from other Jenkins Developers. There is a draft PR for that here: https://github.com/jenkins-infra/jenkins.io/pull/2620, see the screenshot below. It needs some work so that we mention skipped changelog entries, but it could be already a good start.

What do you think?

Thanks in advance,

Oleg

[Slide]

I think this is a great idea! +1 from me for sure.

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[Mark Waite]

+1 from me as well.

On Monday, November 4, 2019 at 12:25:43 PM UTC-7, slide wrote:

I think this is a great idea! +1 from me for sure.

On Mon, Nov 4, 2019 at 12:22 PM Oleg Nenashev wrote:

Hi all,

I would like to improve the Jenkins core contributor recognition a bit and to add mentioning of contributors in the weekly and LTS changelogs. We already add contributors to plugin/tool changeloigs generated by Release Drafter, and it looks to be a great way to highlight contributors and to get them participating more in the Jenkins project. 

Before we proceed with such change, it would be great to get feedback from other Jenkins Developers. There is a draft PR for that here: https://github.com/jenkins-infra/jenkins.io/pull/2620, see the screenshot below. It needs some work so that we mention skipped changelog entries, but it could be already a good start.

What do you think?

Thanks in advance,

Oleg

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[Tracy Miranda]

Awesome +1

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[Marky Jackson]

+1 from me. This is good for a lot of reason but transparency is chief among them

[Daniel Beck]

> On 4. Nov 2019, at 20:21, Oleg Nenashev <o.v.ne...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It needs some work so that we mention skipped changelog entries, but it could be already a good start.

How we solve *this* is the most important part and determines whether this is an overall beneficial change or not.

Right now, we do not actually record everything in the changelog:

- Changes that don't make it into the jenkins.war are skipped, such as Javadoc changes, Jenkinsfile changes, or tests. There's no reason to mention them, because they're not part of what users experience.
- Minor changes like updated log messages, few updated localized messages, minor code cleanups without behavior change, and similar, are skipped. People's attention is limited, and a changelog that contains _everything_ ends up being really long. This is obviously subjective.

As an example, there were 8 visible changelog entries for 2.199, and another 13 that weren't. I wouldn't want to read a 21 entry changelog for a weekly release, and I doubt anyone would.

Once we're starting to credit contributors in the changelog, how will that change? Being credited in the changelog could energize contributors -- and having their change skipped since it didn't make some arbitrary bar might upset them. Would we include more changelog entries just to make them happy, to the detriment of changelog consumers?

Even if you manage to find a nice, objective rule to apply here (which I expect to be impossible while skipping any changes that make it into jenkins.war) -- how will you solve this problem for the LTS.1 changelog with its section "Notable changes since 2.xxx.3", that only mentions perhaps 20% of all changes that show up in weekly changelogs?


Now, perhaps people won't care whether their changes are notable enough to make the (LTS) changelog and are simply happy when they do show up, and I'm completely wrong about this. I simply fear that I'm not.

[Zbynek Konecny]

One could also have a flat list of contributors below the changelist similar to Gradle's release notes:
https://docs.gradle.org/current/release-notes.html
This list could include authors of skipped PRs.

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[Olblak]

I am strongly in favor of mentioning contributors for multiple reasons, so I totally support Oleg on this.

But Daniel also raised a very good point, I am not a big fan of huge changelogs.

So I wonder if it would make sense to have two changelogs? A detailed and a short one?

Where the detailed one could be generated by release drafter

Personally I like very much the idea of mentioning every contributors without detailing a complete list of  contributions.     

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[Oleg Nenashev]

Skipped changelogs would be skipped, that's simple. I was actually about implementing the approach referenced by Zbynek - a list of other contributors in the bottom, maybe with expandable section forxthose who are really curious

[Baptiste Mathus]

+1 on the initiative, and I was going to propose what Zbynek points out. Thanks a bunch Oleg & team.

A simple list of contributors for more trivial changes that weren't worth a dedicated changelog entry seems very important to me.

Who knows if people are not just doing their first attempts, and appearing there will be a great nudge to do more and more :-)!

On Mon, Nov 4, 2019 at 11:13 PM Oleg Nenashev <o.v.ne...@gmail.com> wrote:

Skipped changelogs would be skipped, that's simple. I was actually about implementing the approach referenced by Zbynek - a list of other contributors in the bottom, maybe with expandable section forxthose who are really curious

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[Daniel Beck]

Thanks everyone for the suggestions addressing my concerns around minor changes. I think with a list of "additional contributors" we'd properly take care of them without bloating the changelog.

> On 4. Nov 2019, at 23:35, Baptiste Mathus <bma...@cloudbees.com> wrote:
>
> A simple list of contributors for more trivial changes that weren't worth a
> dedicated changelog entry seems very important to me.

A potential approach for implementing this is https://github.com/jenkins-infra/jenkins.io/pull/2621, including how we'd need to adapt the YAML data to make it work (also getting rid of the longstanding, terrible hack with commented out entries).

[Arnaud Héritier]

+1 for sure

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[domi]

Nice!!! +1

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[Oleg Nenashev]

So we have a consensus that we want to do it.

The rest is an implementation detail.

There are 2 drafts:

• https://github.com/jenkins-infra/jenkins.io/pull/2620 - my original PoC
  
• https://github.com/jenkins-infra/jenkins.io/pull/2621 - suggestion by Daniel which also includes referencing for changes which were skipped in the changelog
  

My suggestion would be to discuss the format in Daniel's PR and then go forward with it.

On Tuesday, November 5, 2019 at 10:11:40 AM UTC+1, domi wrote:

Nice!!! +1

> On 5 Nov 2019, at 00:29, Daniel Beck <m...@beckweb.net> wrote:
>
> Thanks everyone for the suggestions addressing my concerns around minor changes. I think with a list of "additional contributors" we'd properly take care of them without bloating the changelog.
>
>> On 4. Nov 2019, at 23:35, Baptiste Mathus <bma...@cloudbees.com> wrote:
>>
>> A simple list of contributors for more trivial changes that weren't worth a
>> dedicated changelog entry seems very important to me.
>
> A potential approach for implementing this is https://github.com/jenkins-infra/jenkins.io/pull/2621, including how we'd need to adapt the YAML data to make it work (also getting rid of the longstanding, terrible hack with commented out entries).
>
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