Leverage the `changie` tool for changelog management?

[julealgon]

Component(s)

chloggen

Enhancement Proposal

I was looking into changelog automation tools over the past month or so and stumbled upon the changie tool.

Later on, when looking at the OTEL repo, I noticed it was using this chloggen folder which seemed to follow basically the same patterns that changie uses: yaml change "fragments" that are later aggregated into the main CHANGELOG.md as part of versioning/release processes.

I was wondering if the team has considered using that tool for the OTEL repos, and if not, why it decided to maintain its own custom changelog manager?

Motivation

Using the existing tool would not only make it stronger, but any customizations needed by the OTEL team could be implemented there and then used by other consumers who might have similar needs.

Tip

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[atoulme]

No idea why this was done.

Please check that changie's feature set matches what chloggen does, and open issues for any missing functionality if you believe this is worth it. By analyzing the delta, and seeing how long it takes them to support all the ways we use chloggen, we can make an educated decision on whether it is a better tool rather than the current statu quo.

Even then, it might not be enough to push us to move over ; please help us understand what specific features changie provides that would make it worth a switch.

[julealgon]

@atoulme you are asking a lot from a person who doesn't have much context on the build process of OTEL repos. I'm afraid I wouldn't be able to go through all of your CI/CD process to identify each and every way chloggen is used to then be able to tell exactly what (if) anything is missing in changie and use that.

The reason I went ahead and opened this issue was to give the maintainers of the repo here visibility about the changie tool and to see if there would be interest in just leveraging the tool instead of maintaining the nontrivial custom changelog tool here, because at first glance it seemed to me that a LOT of the functionality of changie was basically being re-implemented.

I understand sometimes one needs to create custom tooling for special needs, but if there is a popular, well-known tool in the ecosystem that provides the services that one needs, then I'd rather leverage that library than spend the effort on maintaining the custom solution.

It would be up to the team to check if such a change would make sense and then apply it.

You are free to close if you feel this is not worth the team's time.