Automate releases with knope

[n8maninger]

This makes PRs slightly more annoying because they will need to have either a documented change set or conventional commits, but this will automate the release process and improve documentation. This is mostly the same setup as renterd and hostd with the addition of tagging the release when the preview PR closes.

To add a changeset to a PR:

1. install Knope https://knope.tech/installation/
2. Run knope document-change

[lukechampine]

I have to install some new tool, and this is gonna stick a bunch of files in a .changesets directory in the repo?

How has the experience been with knope in renterd and hostd so far? I looked at those repos and it seems like every .changesets file is just a PR title with no further information. Have we used it to cut an actual release yet? As you can probably tell, I'm skeptical of stuff like this, but if it's been a clear win for us I'll change my tune.

[lukechampine]

(I feel like there will be an AI tool soon that does all of this without needing any extra human legwork... if it doesn't already exist)

[n8maninger]

I have to install some new tool, and this is gonna stick a bunch of files in a .changesets directory in the repo?

How has the experience been with knope in renterd and hostd so far? I looked at those repos and it seems like every .changesets file is just a PR title with no further information. Have we used it to cut an actual release yet? As you can probably tell, I'm skeptical of stuff like this, but if it's been a clear win for us I'll change my tune.

I find the automation to be very useful. renterd currently uses GitHub's automatic change log tool, which is terrible for human readability. I manually write the hostd log for every release. core and coreutils have zero change documentation. Our versioning is, effectively, "tag whatever feels appropriate." I'm of the opinion that the slight inconvenience is worth the automation and standardization. Reinventing the wheel with a custom tool or trying to use AI tools that are mostly misses at this stage to avoid a .changeset folder when a decent workflow already exists is a waste, imo.

You don't have to install the tool. You can manually create the change set file. If it's a small change, you can use conventional commits: fix(chain): do stuff.

[n8maninger]

If there is another actively maintained and well documented tool that gets us human-readable documentation and automated versioning with less overhead, I'm happy to use it. This is just the workflow I am familiar with.

[ChrisSchinnerl]

As Nate has already mentioned while we have set it up in our dev branch, we haven't had a proper release with knope yet. So the first changelog will require some manual intervention. But after that it should be smooth sailing.

Imo this is a great compromise since all you need to do is either use a conventional commit or add a file for it to be satisfied and in exchange we get useful changelogs.

[lukechampine]

Is this a knope changelog? SiaFoundation/desktop#98 or some other tool?

AFAICT, in practice these changelogs will just be a list of the PRs that were merged since the last release. Which, sure, is better than nothing. But you don't need a tool for that.

IMO, if you want release notes that are actually pleasant to read, you gotta do it the old-fashioned way: pull up the commit history, identify the most salient changes, and summarize them in a few sentences. I did that for siad for years, and I'll happily do it again.

[n8maninger]

That is GitHub's automatically generated change log 🤢

Here are some examples of Knope ones:

• https://github.com/knope-dev/knope/releases/tag/knope%2Fv0.18.0
• https://github.com/SiaFoundation/sia-sdk-rs/blob/eef9425b58b11bb228b9360dc7f052b2d2a18e62/sia/CHANGELOG.md
• https://github.com/SiaFoundation/hostd/blob/57eca595e18c2325a4a6dcd54ac5cd71169836fc/CHANGELOG.md

[lukechampine]

wait. You can just press a button in the GitHub UI to create the .changeset file? ok, that's much more tolerable lol