Home: Reduce friction for Release Notes maintenance

[mteper]

Too many packages do not include release notes, and I speculate that the reason lies in the friction involved in doing so, as the developer is required to actively maintain the .nuspec file. Many projects build directly from the VS project bypassing .nuspec altogether.

A few changes would improve this situation:

• add support for pulling in content from an external file
• have nuget pack look for releasenotes.md
• add support for a standard changelog URL
• add parameter to nuget pack for passing in changelog URL

[ashmind]

ReleaseNotes.md would be great, especially considering ASP.NET's project.json does not allow newlines other than \r\n, which is unusable for any large-ish metadata.

Alternatively -- sections from ReadMe.md for both Description and Release Notes (description has same problem with project.json).

[leppie]

Allow release notes to be constructed from commits to git or TFS, etc.

[jlundstocholm]

I strongly second this - the friction to create the release notes package configuration is too high.

We build our nuget packages from Visual Studio Online, and I would actually much prefer to simply be able to add release notes via a command line parameter. In VSO we have already set up a build parameter with version number information, so we configure the Nuget Packager build step with "Nuget arguments"

-version $(NugetVersion)

It would be great to be able to add simple text like

-releaseNotes $(<insert build variable here>)

[yishaigalatzer]

@NickCraver has provided more insights and some good ideas. These should be addressed when we handle this suggestion. https://github.com/NuGet/Home/issues/1734

[304NotModified]

In the recent updates (NLog, yeah we're listed https://github.com/NuGet/Home/issues/1734) we do add the changelog, but we found out it's pretty useless as the Visual Studio client isn't even showing the changelog...

edit: I see that's https://github.com/NuGet/Home/issues/1823

[rmarinho]

Any progress on this?

[NickCraver]

My comments from #1734:

In short: I propose making the Release Notes field markdown, or at the very least have nuget.org atuomatically convert URLs into hyperlinks in the field. Right now the breakdown of the top 50 packages on nuget.org is:

• 33 have no release notes
• 12 have only a link (or a link + a few words)
• 5 have release notes in some form

It's tedious to maintain both a changelog in a repo as well as in all packages (note: this may include _multiple_ packages for a single repo, multiplying the pain). I feel that's supported by the 90% above with no notes in NuGet. What is doable is maintaining _one_ copy of changes - which means linking to it is very appealing, evidenced by the 24% above (many of which are Microsoft packages).

I'd like to throw out the following options as suggested fixes:

1. Make the field markdown (and nuget.org convert/render it properly) - this makes it much more useful overall.
2. Auto-link URLs in release notes - so if you use it as a field it effectively becomes a link.
3. Add a ReleaseNotesLink-like field specifically for a URL.
4. Change the rules on the schema, and indicate if the field _is_ a URI, it'll be rendered linkified.

For the curious, here's the entire top 50 list:

• 1 (_none_): EntityFramework
• 2 (_none_): Json.NET
• 3 (link only): Bootstrap CSS
• 4 (_none_): jQuery
• 5 (_none_): Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc
• 6 (_none_): WebGrease
• 7 (_none_): Microsoft HTTP Client Libraries
• 8 (link only): Microsoft ASP.NET Web API 2.2
• 9 (_none_): Microsoft.AspNet.Identity.EntityFramework
• 10 (_none_): Microsoft.Owin.Host.SystemWeb
• 11 (_none_): jQuery UI (Combined Library)
• 12 (_none_): Microsoft ASP.NET Identity Owin
• 13 (has notes!): NUnit Version 3
• 14 (_none_): AngularJS
• 15 (link only): Microsoft ASP.NET Web Pages
• 16 (has notes!): Moq: an enjoyable mocking library
• 17 (link only): Microsoft ASP.NET Web API 2.2 Client Libraries
• 18 (_none_): Microsoft.Owin
• 19 (_none_): AutoMapper
• 20 (_none_): ANTLRv3
• 21 (_none_): Microsoft.AspNet.Razor
• 22 (_none_): Microsoft.Owin.Security.OAuth
• 23 (_none_): Microsoft.Owin.Security
• 24 (_none_): Microsoft BCL Portability Pack
• 25 (_none_): Microsoft.Owin.Security.Cookies
• 26 (_none_): Microsoft ASP.NET Identity Core
• 27 (link only): Microsoft jQuery Unobtrusive Validation
• 28 (_none_): log4net [1.2.14]
• 29 (link only): Application Insights for Web Applications
• 30 (_none_): Microsoft ASP.NET Web Optimization Framework
• 31 (_none_): jQuery Validation
• 32 (link only): Microsoft ASP.NET Web API 2.2 Web Host
• 33 (link only): Microsoft ASP.NET Web API 2.2 Core Libraries
• 34 (_none_): Modernizr
• 35 (link only): Microsoft ASP.NET SignalR
• 36 (link only): Microsoft jQuery Unobtrusive Ajax
• 37 (_none_): knockoutjs
• 38 (has notes! - but it's just an "oops" message): HtmlAgilityPack
• 39 (_none_): AngularJS Core
• 40 (_none_): Microsoft BCL Build Components
• 41 (has notes!): ODataLib for OData V1-3
• 42 (_none_): Application Insights API for JavaScript Applications
• 43 (_none_): Microsoft.Owin.Security.Google
• 44 (_none_): Unity
• 45 (has notes!): NLog
• 46 (_none_): Ajax Control Toolkit
• 47 (_none_): System.Data.SQLite (x86/x64)
• 48 (_none_): Microsoft.Owin.Security.Facebook
• 49 (link only): Microsoft ASP.NET Web API 2.2 OWIN
• 50 (link only): Microsoft ASP.NET Web API 2.2 Cross-Origin Support

[304NotModified]

45 (has notes!): NLog

scratch NLog. We don't use it anymore as it takes to much time a the gain is too small (no formatting and not visible everywhere).

[magol]

Many projects are using http://keepachangelog.com to keep the release logs. It would be amazing if nuget can parse out the release log for each version from a single changelog.md.

It is a number of different formats of changelogs, so maybe it must be a parameter that specify the format.