It is very important to maintain a log for news of how updating to the new version of the software will affect end-users. This is why we enforce collection of the change fragment files in pull requests as per Towncrier philosophy.
The idea is that when somebody makes a change, they must record the bits that would affect end-users, only including information that would be useful to them. Then, when the maintainers publish a new release, they'll automatically use these records to compose a change log for the respective version. It is important to understand that including unnecessary low-level implementation related details generates noise that is not particularly useful to the end-users most of the time. And so such details should be recorded in the Git history rather than a changelog.
multidict
uses towncrier
for changelog management.
To submit a change note about your PR, add a text file into the
CHANGES/
folder. It should contain an
explanation of what applying this PR will change in the way
end-users interact with the project. One sentence is usually
enough but feel free to add as many details as you feel necessary
for the users to understand what it means.
Use the past tense for the text in your fragment because,
combined with others, it will be a part of the "news digest"
telling the readers what changed in a specific version of
the library since the previous version. You should also use
reStructuredText syntax for highlighting code (inline or block),
linking parts of the docs or external sites.
However, you do not need to reference the issue or PR numbers here
as towncrier will automatically add a reference to all of the
affected issues when rendering the news file.
If you wish to sign your change, feel free to add -- by
:user:`github-username`
at the end (replace github-username
with your own!).
Finally, name your file following the convention that Towncrier
understands: it should start with the number of an issue or a
PR followed by a dot, then add a patch type, like feature
,
doc
, contrib
etc., and add .rst
as a suffix. If you
need to add more than one fragment, you may add an optional
sequence number (delimited with another period) between the type
and the suffix.
In general the name will follow <pr_number>.<category>.rst
pattern,
where the categories are:
bugfix
: A bug fix for something we deemed an improper undesired behavior that got corrected in the release to match pre-agreed expectations.feature
: A new behavior, public APIs. That sort of stuff.deprecation
: A declaration of future API removals and breaking changes in behavior.breaking
: When something public gets removed in a breaking way. Could be deprecated in an earlier release.doc
: Notable updates to the documentation structure or build process.packaging
: Notes for downstreams about unobvious side effects and tooling. Changes in the test invocation considerations and runtime assumptions.contrib
: Stuff that affects the contributor experience. e.g. Running tests, building the docs, setting up the development environment.misc
: Changes that are hard to assign to any of the above categories.
A pull request may have more than one of these components, for example a code change may introduce a new feature that deprecates an old feature, in which case two fragments should be added. It is not necessary to make a separate documentation fragment for documentation changes accompanying the relevant code changes.
File :file:`CHANGES/603.removal.1.rst`:
Dropped Python 3.5 support; Python 3.6 is the minimal supported Python version.
File :file:`CHANGES/550.bugfix.rst`:
Started shipping Windows wheels for the x86 architecture.
File :file:`CHANGES/553.feature.rst`:
Added support for ``GenericAliases`` (``MultiDict[str]``) under Python 3.9 and higher.