Option to skip uploading changelog

[p3lim]

I specifically need this for GitHub releases, but for all three would be good too.

[kemayo]

As a workaround, I wound up building a manual changelog and then using a tool to slice out just the current release's changes to use as the packager-changelog. This gets me decent GitHub release notes... at the cost of overwriting my WoWI changelog with only the current release. So, yeah, it's not perfect.

[p3lim]

I make my own changelogs in markdown format, ended up just trimming the changelog down to the first header and paragraph(s).

- name: Trim changelog
  run: sed -ni '1p;2,/^###/{/^###/q;p;}' CHANGELOG.md

If you want to close the issue that's fine by me, I'm satisfied with this.

[teelolws]

Actually I'd like this, an option to not include the changelog.md in the file. I still like the changelog it writes for the description fields, though.

[nanderson11]

I was looking for a way to have a manual changelog and only include the latest version's changes in the Github release and Curseforge release. The Github Action that @kemayo made, kemayo/actions-recent-changelog, worked great for this. I added one extra step, having the packager ignore the temporary changelog made. For quick reference, I added the code below to the respective files:

Packager Workflow YAML (before the packager step)

- uses: kemayo/actions-recent-changelog@v1
        with:
          input: CHANGELOG.md
          output: RECENT_CHANGES.md

.pkgmeta

manual-changelog:
  filename: RECENT_CHANGES.md
  markup-type: markdown

ignore:
  - RECENT_CHANGES.md

I would definitely like it if having a manual changelog and only including the latest version's changes was a part of the packager though. I'm not sure if that should be a separate issue though, since it's not the same thing as the title of this issue, even though this solution was discussed here.

[p3lim]

@nanderson11 The packager ignores dotfiles by default, if you name the output from kemayo's action .RECENT_CHANGES.md or something you don't need to manually ignore it in pkgmeta.

As far the "packager should do everything" I disagree, it should package and upload, everything else could and should be handled by other steps that are more specialized for it.
Hell, you could even argue that the "upload" part should be separate, but it's just a convenience that the packager handles this since the destinations are so unique to it.

[kemayo]

Speaking as the person who wrote said action, it does only work because it's very opinionated about the format a changelog should use. Building that opinion into the packager doesn't seem like the right thing to do. (It'd be like if the automatic changelog from the git history decided to suddenly require that you use one of those change-tagging syntaxes to work...)

[nanderson11]

@p3lim That's a good idea to use a preceding dot, thanks.

And yeah, I definitely understand that this is on the fringes of "too specific." Although if the packager created Github/CF/etc releases, but couldn't include a change log in those releases, that wouldn't be a very useful release. And so the packager has the commit history change log and the manual change log. It would just be nice if that option also didn't restrict you to full history or just that specific version.

@kemayo Yeah, I did think about there being lots of different ways to write a change log, but an approach that supports https://keepachangelog.com and https://common-changelog.org/ seems like a reasonable place to start. Your action worked for me because we both followed a standard.

Anyways, I just mainly wanted to say "hey, I ran into this issue too" and if it's a common enough problem, maybe it can be built in. Thank you both, for the packager, and for the recent change log action.

[p3lim]

It would just be nice if that option also didn't restrict you to full history or just that specific version.

That's why the manual changelog option is there, the default log is bare-minimum, and should stay that way, not opinionated at all.