Consider adding contributor information to release notes

[sleberknight]

Should we add contributor information to the release notes? If so, how? For example, we could add the contributor information for each item in the lists. Also, should there be a special mention of contributors who made their first contribution? There are probably other things we could add but these are the basics.

[sleberknight]

Since we are changing (see #194) the way we generate change logs, we cannot easily get the contributor/author for a specific issue or pull request using the REST API endpoints. That information is not included in the Search endpoint. Instead, the Search endpoint provides the issue and pull request assignee information, but that may be different (especially for pull requests) from the author making the contribution.

An alternative is to go back to using the commits (after #194 this would be a fair amount of work) but using the GitHub REST API instead of using the git log command locally. Regardless, this method is still brittle since it relies on parsing commit messages, which we know can cause incorrect change logs (e.g., a dependabot pull request to update a different library which includes all the updates with #NNN in the message).

From looking at the REST API responses and schemas, it does not seem that you can map an issue and/or pull request back to a specific commit, or commits. If true, then I don't know how you could do this other than to require a pull request for everything and use the user associated with the pull request, which would also mean we would need to add a milestone to each pull request as well as issues, and then de-duplicate them (so we don't list the issue and the linked PR).

So, it doesn't really seem all that useful without imposing rules and/or restrictions that I don't really think we should do.

[sleberknight]

Also found this discussion:

Identify relationship between issues and pull requests (v3 API)

Basically, it seems you can't¹ do this with the v3 (REST) API but you apparently can do it using the GraphQL API:

The Issue object type has a property closedByPullRequestsReferences, and the PullRequest object contains the property closingIssuesReferences.

ref: GitHub GraphQL - Objects

Footnotes

1. In the discussion someone posted a comment about iterating through the timeline of issues and finding "cross-referenced" events and some other stuff that probably works, but is more involved than I am interested in getting into. ↩

[sleberknight]

Some other relevant references¹:

• Is there any api to get all issues associated with a given list of commit
• Getting Linked issues and Projects associated with a pull request form (sic) github api v3
• Get referenced pull request from issue

Footnotes

1. Google search for "github rest api find issue associated with a pull request" ↩

[sleberknight]

See Some kiwi GraphQL queries for some sample queries.

[sleberknight]

I used the GitHub GraphQL Explorer to play around with some queries.

Here's a page explaining how to use: Using the Explorer