The release notes of Vitess describe what a new release is about. We list the new features, bug fixes, important announcement, deprecation notice, etc. Since we have a release note document for each release, it was important to us that we create a tool that automatically generate them for us. The tool can be found in this package.

How to use release note generation tool? #

First, we need to git fetch the remote we want to work with and make sure we are up-to-date with the server.

Then, we use the Makefile command release-notes as followed:

make release-notes FROM="v11.0.0" TO="upstream/main" VERSION="v12.0.0" SUMMARY="./my_summary.md"

In this example we are generating release notes for v12.0.0.

The FROM argument is required, it tells the tool from which point in time we need to analyze the different pull requests. The value here is v11.0.0 which corresponds to the v11.0.0 release git tag.

The TO argument is not required and defaults to HEAD. It tells the tool the upper limit point in time for the pull request analysis. Here the value is upstream/main corresponding to the main branch of vitessio/vitess.

The VERSION argument is the name of the new release.

The SUMMARY argument is optional, it is a path to a README file that contains a text that will added in the Announcement section of the release notes.

How to add pull requests to the release notes? #

When generating the release notes, only the pull requests labeled with release notes will be listed.

Pull requests can also be labeled with release notes (needs details). Those will be listed in the Announcement section of the release note with a special TODO that requires human intervention for further explanation on what the pull request do. For instance, it can be an important pull request that deprecates a part of Vitess, or an important feature that we want to talk about.