Keeping a nice changelog

[mhauru]

@seabbs pointed out that it could be helpful to have a place to check changes in recent versions. I think @penelopeysm recently mentioned something similar, about how it could be good practice to type some human-readable change notes at least for all breaking releases. I think this could be a good idea, have them as part of GitHub releases if nothing else. An example of how epinowcast is doing theirs: https://package.epinowcast.org/news/index.html

[penelopeysm]

If you trigger JuliaRegistrator with release notes, it gets automatically added to the github release, I did this for the two latest versions of DynamicPPL: https://github.com/TuringLang/DynamicPPL.jl/releases

[penelopeysm]

Slightly frustratingly, JuliaRegistrator expects a really precise format for the release notes that is (as far as I know) not documented. For minor version bumps it has to look like this

@JuliaRegistrator register

Release notes:

## Breaking changes

- Foo
- Bar

[JuliaRegistrator]

Registration pull request created: JuliaRegistries/General/122924

Tagging

After the above pull request is merged, it is recommended that a tag is created on this repository for the registered package version.

This will be done automatically if the Julia TagBot GitHub Action is installed, or can be done manually through the github interface, or via:

git tag -a v0.36.0 -m "<description of version>" 7d6f8ed53b59047c86fb1c09c9d593ca30250a60
git push origin v0.36.0

[penelopeysm]

Oh, for goodness' sake.

[mhauru]

Hahaha, it's so eager to help.

@seabbs also pointed out that having one centralised place for all the packages in the ecosystem might be good. Maybe an autogenerated page of turinglang.org that lists all new releases of all of our packages?

[penelopeysm]

I think that's this TuringLang/turinglang.github.io#104

[seabbs]

Love the bot fighting back here. In terms of a central place I meant a single place for release notes/turing news etc kind of like this https://www.tidyverse.org/blog/ its a big effort though and we don't do a good job of it in epinowcast land (i.e we did it once for one package https://www.epinowcast.org/blog.html).

[penelopeysm]

That would be really cool. I know there was some kind of attempt at having a blog https://turinglang.org/news/ but that predates our time on the project

[penelopeysm]

@mhauru I've been toying with the idea of having, say, fortnightly or monthly updates on what we are up to in Turing.jl land. It can be very lightweight, just a few bullet points that we post on Slack (mailing lists are very difficult to set up nowadays, I learnt this last year), and we could also use it to highlight topics that we'd like input on. I could just ping everyone on the dev team to contribute bullet points a couple of days before.

This is of course not quite as formal as what Sam is thinking of, but it'd be better than nothing and I think might help to build a bit of a community vibe — what do you think?

(If we wanted to formalise it / have a proper archive of them we could also simultaneously publish it on the website, which wouldn't be too much work.)

[penelopeysm]

cc @yebai too re. the above!

[DominiqueMakowski]

just chiming in here to say that as a non-slack user I'd be glad to get these updates, so +1 to also have them in some more public places (website, GH discussion thread, julia discourse...)

[yebai]

Thanks, @penelopeysm, for tagging me. It's an excellent idea to keep a changelog on the website. We can cross-post on Slack, Turing.jl Twitter and Julia discourse

[mhauru]

Agreed, I like it. I take it that these would mention any significant releases but could also include content about ongoing work and planning?

[penelopeysm]

@mhauru Yup, exactly!

@DominiqueMakowski Thanks for letting us know! Follow up question: how do you keep up to date with stuff in Turing land? Do you just periodically check our GitHub issues?

I'm wondering if a cheap way of emulating an email newsletter might be to have a dedicated issue or discussion for these, and then you can subscribe to it for notifications.

[DominiqueMakowski]

how do you keep up to date with stuff in Turing land?

I'm "watching" 👀 all activity on Turing.jl and DynamicPPL (btw I appreciate the context provided for most issues and links with other issues etc. ☺)