Changelog subsection in addition to kinds

[emmyoop]

I just started to play with changie but what I've seen so far is great! Looks like it might be able to help resolve

I don't think this is possible with changie now, but would be happy to be corrected. I want to give credit to my open source contributors with a Contributors section in my CHANGELOG. It would be a section in addition to each kind.

Something along the lines of this:

# Changelog
All notable changes to this project will be documented in this file.

The format is based on [Keep a Changelog](https://keepachangelog.com/en/1.0.0/),
adheres to [Semantic Versioning](https://semver.org/spec/v2.0.0.html),
and is generated by [Changie](https://github.com/miniscruff/changie).

## my-repo 1.1.0 (January 01, 2022)

### Features
- Cool new thing that will be awesome. ([#1234](https://github.com/emmyoop/my-repo/issues/1234), [#4444](https://github.com/emmyoop/my-repo/pull/4444))

### Fixes
- Fixed something. ([#1234](https://github.com/emmyoop/my-repo/issues/1234), [#4487](https://github.com/emmyoop/my-repo/pull/4487))

Contributors:
- [@not-me](https://github.com/not-me) ([#4487](https://github.com/emmyoop/my-repo/pull/4487))

I think this is a pretty common scenario in open source. If this isn't possible with changie currently, would you be open to adding this functionality?

[miniscruff]

Currently there is no option for this, you could add an extra custom input to add each contributor as part of each change sort of like: https://github.com/goreleaser/goreleaser/releases/tag/v1.3.0. But not the option of adding contributors with avatars at the bottom.

At the moment changie has no context to git as it works entirely from input so you would have to provide it the value of your github account. Changie could support this similar to how it does the body, maybe as an optional configuration but there are no plans for supporting it as of now.

I think it would be interesting to support this but it would have to be sort of agnostic to git and contributors as a whole. Which may sound weird but what if there was say a custom input for "githubAccount" on each change. Then a custom blocks section that looked sort of like:

# purely hypothetical here don't get attached
custom:
- key: githubAccount
  type: string
  minLength: 2
# we would run the block format per change to create a block at the end.
# this would happen during the batch command.
blocks:
  - label: "Contributors"
    fields: 
    - "githubAccount" # could grab multiple?
    unique: true # not quite right if we support multiple fields as what would be unique then?
    sort: "asc" # would need to specify which field to sort by
    format: "- [@{{.accountName}}](https://github.com/{{.accountName}})"

There would probably be a few examples for common situations as it could be complex.

This sort of format, although verbose, would support contributors along with other end of release notes things like counting the number of fixed bugs or total fixed changes. The query system would have to be refined and would probably turn into a bit of a mess but hard coding contributors is not really what I would want to do.

Kind of rambling at this point so tl;dr you can add custom inputs per change, you can not add a custom block.

[emmyoop]

I was definitely thinking of having contributors enter their usernames via a custom field or something along that line, not pulling info from git. I'm just starting to evaluate changie for my company and this is one piece (critical for us) that is missing. The result of the conversation below with @rocktavious seems like it would meet our needs and be flexible for the future as well!

[miniscruff]

I am going through some designing this week and I have next week off so I hope to get something by then. Feel free to reach out or tag me if you have any more details on how your company or team might want to use changie.

[rocktavious]

Something like this would be really useful for my company too!

@miniscruff What if instead of it being so prescriptive you could just specify a custom footer to the generated change md file

custom:
- key: githubAccount
  type: string
  minLength: 2
batch:
  footer: |
    Contributors:
    {{ range $item := .changes }}
       - [@{{$item.accountName}}](https://github.com/{{$accountName}})
    {{ end }}

This way its super flexible to any other kind of footer additions as well as possibly great for my custom usecase too.

Then it could also be easily extended to completely control the creation of the batch changelog with header, body and footer expression format - IE:

batch:
  header:
  body:
  footer:

I don't love the "batch" name here if there is something better let me know. I would be highly interested in implementing this for you!

[rocktavious]

Ya i agree with this - go template syntax is a bit limited - we would need a fully fledged templating language kinda like Ruby's ERB or python's Jinja2 - being able to use full logic syntax with loops and setting variables to give the must control.

[rocktavious]

A quick search online seems to point to using sprig and then you can build lists in a loop and use functions on them like unique to handle that programming control need.
http://masterminds.github.io/sprig/

[miniscruff]

Sprig seems like a great tool ( I believe I already use the semver package ), I do sort of like the idea of blocks that you can combine but a single template also works. I don't think the current batch command is flexible enough for this sort of addition though so while I think about how to implement anything like this. Probably a round or two of refactoring and organizing how to go about dealing with headers, footers and maybe other hooks Maybe pre-batch or pre-fragment, I don't want to go overboard but not thinking about it will make features like this harder later on.

[rocktavious]

If there is anything I can do to help I will gladly work on it. I use changie in 5 of our companies public facing projects (and have many more i will be adding it to) i'm also familiar with cobra based CLI's.

Just point me in the direction you want me to go or issue (related to this) you want me to work and I can take a stab at an MR.

[miniscruff]

I think for now I want to take a step back and look at the batch command, which is the bulk of the work changie really is. I want to see if we can modularize it a little more to really feed into more templating and functionality without requiring so much work each time. Adding the dry-run option really came to light some core issues.

I will try and do some research and get a little architecture designs going and then I can get some issues created. I want to make sure we maintain compatibility so it would go into 1.x so gotta take that into account as well.

[miniscruff]

This feature is now included in v1.4.0 https://github.com/miniscruff/changie/releases/tag/v1.4.0 , and an example was included in the docs that might help https://changie.dev/config/header-footer/#contributors-footer .

Edit: With the change to auto generated config docs the new URL is https://changie.dev/config/#config-footerformat. Thanks @llaville

[llaville]

URL from documentation as changed (404): It seems to be now https://changie.dev/config/#config-footerformat