0004-use-a-changelog-for-tracking-changes-in-a-release.md

2. Use a changelog for tracking changes in a release

Date: 2019-09-13

Status

Accepted

Context

Documenting changes for a release can be challenging. It often involves reading back through commit messages and PRs, looking for and classifying changes, which is a time consuming and error prone process.

Decision

We will use a changelog (CHANGELOG.md) in the Keep a Changelog 1.0.0 format to be updated when code changes happen, rather than at release time.

Consequences

This will make compiling releases much simpler, as the process for determining changes in a release is simply a matter of looking at the changelog.

This does add some overhead to making code changes, and requires that releases update the changelog as part of their process, but those overheads are small.