Re: A walkthrough of some of the challenges with auto generated changelogs

[Richard Purdie <richard.purdie@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Thu, 2026-09-03 at 07:55 +0000, Daniel Turull wrote:
> Thanks for the input.
> 
> On Wed, 2026-09-02 at 12:47 +0100, Richard Purdie wrote:
> > Everyone keeps telling me how great these auto generated change logs
> > are and yes, they can be helpful but they are also piling pressure on
> > me as everyone has their own preferences and personal "triggers" for
> > issues. I keep getting told how XXX shouldn't have merged without YYY
> > being tweaked but the tweaks/triggers vary per person. I also get told
> > a changelog is better than none and that we shouldn't be spending time
> > on it. I can't win.
> 
> Maybe I should write a proposal on what to include in the commit messages
> regarding the changelog changes?
> 
> My opinion is also the latter. A changelog is better than none and that we
> shouldn't be spending time on it. There is always the original changelog if
> people is interested in all changes.
> 
> The original intent was for the stable releases, where is more important to know
> what has changed.

Agreed, it definitely is useful but I did want to make sure people
could see the other side of this too. None of this was meant as
critisism, more just open feedback on how it 'feels' having used it for
a while. Some of the implications are not quite what I'd foreseen.

> > I'm feeling bad that I haven't written down the things that are causing
> > issues so I'm now trying to do that here.
> > 
> > One general issue is that we can often delete the "Source: ZZZ" lines.
> > They're good to explain where the data came from, we don't need to keep
> > them in the final commit message in most cases (unless they're urls?).
> 
> I'll create a patch for it for the AUH to truncate it, so we have both. That
> should be simpler.

Ok.

> > So in summary:
> >  - could/should the Source: be after the scissors if non-url?
> >  - can we strip out the github urls for pull requests?
> >  - can we linewrap the data better?
> >  - can we drop commit hash refrerences?
> >  - should the truncation limit be slightly higher?
> 
> The last one should be easy. It is a configuration parameter in the AUH. For the
> rest, I will look at all the issues that you listed next week, together with
> what Ross reported a few days ago. I hope I can come up with small patches
> getting it better. I will probably need to add some heuristics to distinguish
> between the different cases and hope not break things.
> 
> If more people has feedback, please send it to me.
> 
> The original intent was to be a help when doing recipe updates and not a burden
> for you.

No problem, as I said, this isn't meant as critism and I am trying to
give some hints on where/how it could be improved. I appreciate some of
the suggestions aren't easy (and hopefully some are). Thanks for
working on it and looking at the tweaks!

Cheers,

Richard