Add release notes

[lp9052]

As the Solars package gains wider adoption, it becomes increasingly important to provide users with a convenient way to track changes and make informed decisions when selecting versions. Adding release notes would greatly benefit users.

[maartenbreddels]

Yes, I agree. Although we do our best to be strict in our commit messages (following conventional commits) it may not be the best interface to browse through changes.

There are a few things that come to mind:

• It should be low friction to the main/core developers
• I think commit messages can be used as basis for a changelog, which will be low friction. Still, I think there are many commit messages that should not be included, the most obvious ones being typos in code or documentation.

A few projects I know

• https://pypi.org/project/towncrier seems to link a issue/PR number to a changelog snippets (seperate file), the snippets will be merged into a larger changelog document, which seems to auto link to the PR/issue. Downside is that before making a PR, you do not know the issue/PR number.
• https://github.com/nedbat/scriv also uses changelog snippets
• https://github.com/vaab/gitchangelog uses a variant of conventional commits that also include the audience. I think this is useful to provide a way to filter out messages targeted to particular audiences (not sure if that is a feature though)

A good discussion item is
pypa/build#169 (comment)

Also, another point raised by pypa/build#169 (comment) is "Commit messages [snip] are much harder to review than files in the repository."

I've been doing full manual changelog in the past, and that does increase friction by so much that I do not want to do that again without having some helper tools.

More ideas are welcome!

[maartenbreddels]

For the moment, we feed the git log to chatgpt, which is better than manually:
https://github.com/widgetti/solara/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md

Do you think this is sufficient?

[lp9052]

It looks more than pleasing to me.