The release notes of Vitess describe what a new release is about. We list the new features, bug fixes, important announcement, deprecation notice, etc.

Since we publish release notes for each release, it was important to us to have a tool that can automatically generate them for us. This tool can be found in this package.

How to use the release notes generation tool #

First, we need to git fetch the remote we want to work with and make sure we are up-to-date with the server.

Then, we use the Makefile command release-notes as followed:

make VERSION="v15.0.0" FROM="v14.0.0" TO="HEAD" SUMMARY="./doc/releasenotes/15_0_0_summary.md" release-notes

In this example we are generating release notes for v15.0.0.

The FROM argument is required, it tells the tool from which point in time we need to analyze the different pull requests. The value here is v14.0.0 which corresponds to the v14.0.0 release git tag.

The TO argument is not required and defaults to HEAD. It tells the tool the upper limit point in time for the pull request analysis. Here the value is upstream/main corresponding to the main branch of vitessio/vitess.

The VERSION argument is the name of the new release.

The SUMMARY argument is optional, it is a path to a README file that contains text to prefix the release notes with what the maintainers wrote before the release.