Crate single unified changelog for multiple git repositories

[mcflyhalf]

Before writing this request, I read #13 .

Problem
I have 2 git repositories core_repo and plugins_repo. The 2 are developed and maintained by the same team and are deployed together; therefore we would like to have only a single changelog that tracks the changes from the 2 repos. However, when I use git-cliff --unreleased --repository $CORE_REPO_DIR $PLUGINS_REPO_DIR --tag 5.1.0 I esentially get 2 changelogs, 1 after the other.

Solution
Is it possible to add a flag to unify these changelogs as though all the commits came from a single repository?
If it is easier, it would be okay to also provide a way to manipulate/merge the context(s) (it seems to me that 2 of them are generated in this case) before they are passed to the templating engine.

Additional context
Here is an example to demonstrate this practically
Within repo1

git log
feat: feature 1 in repo 1
fix: bugfix 1 in repo 1
feat: feature 2 in repo 1
fix: bugfix 2 in repo 1

Within repo2

git log
feat: feature 1 in repo 2
fix: bugfix 1 in repo 2
feat: feature 2 in repo 2
fix: bugfix 2 in repo 2

When I run git-cliff --unreleased --repository $REPO1_DIR $REPO2_DIR --tag 1.0.1, the output looks like

# Changelog

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

## [1.0.1] - 2023-07-14

### Bug Fixes

- Bugfix 1 in repo 1
-  Bugfix 2 in repo 1

### Features

- Feature 1 in repo 1
- Feature 2 in repo 1

## [1.0.1] - 2023-07-14

### Bug Fixes

- Bugfix 1 in repo 2
-  Bugfix 2 in repo 2

### Features

- Feature 1 in repo 2
- Feature 2 in repo 2

<!-- generated by git-cliff -->

I am instead asking for a way to unify these into:

# Changelog

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

## [1.0.1] - 2023-07-14

### Bug Fixes

- Bugfix 1 in repo 1
- Bugfix 2 in repo 1
- Bugfix 1 in repo 2
- Bugfix 2 in repo 2

### Features

- Feature 1 in repo 1
- Feature 2 in repo 1
- Feature 1 in repo 2
- Feature 2 in repo 2

<!-- generated by git-cliff -->

I would have been happy to submit a PR but unfortunately I have never used Rust before (and cannot find a Python tool that is both well documented and flexible).

[welcome]

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[orhun]

Hello, sorry for the late reply. 🙈

Currently git-cliff processes the releases of the given repositories separately thus the problem with the unified approach is that release metadata changes for the same release. For example, you might have tagged v0.1.0 for both repositories but the release commit/timestamp/previous version is different. This means that we might need to use metadata for one of the releases and discard the rest.

This is not really optimal and I can't think of another possible solution for now.

[muja]

Hi, would it at least be possible to sort the sections by tag? Currently the output is like this:

# Changelog

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

## repo-1 [1.0.1] - 2023-07-14

### Bug Fixes

- Bugfix 1 in repo 1
-  Bugfix 2 in repo 1

### Features

- Feature 1 in repo 1
- Feature 2 in repo 1

## repo-2 [1.0.2] - 2024-09-02

### Bug Fixes

- Bugfix 3 in repo 2

## repo-2 [1.0.1] - 2023-07-14

### Bug Fixes

- Bugfix 1 in repo 2
-  Bugfix 2 in repo 2

### Features

- Feature 1 in repo 2
- Feature 2 in repo 2

<!-- generated by git-cliff -->

Instead it would be nice if the newer tags were on top:

# Changelog

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

## repo-2 [1.0.2] - 2024-09-02

### Bug Fixes

- Bugfix 3 in repo 2

## repo-1 [1.0.1] - 2023-07-14

### Bug Fixes

- Bugfix 1 in repo 1
-  Bugfix 2 in repo 1

### Features

- Feature 1 in repo 1
- Feature 2 in repo 1

## repo-2 [1.0.1] - 2023-07-14

### Bug Fixes

- Bugfix 1 in repo 2
-  Bugfix 2 in repo 2

### Features

- Feature 1 in repo 2
- Feature 2 in repo 2

<!-- generated by git-cliff -->

[orhun]

@muja you can probably achieve that in the template by using the sort function.

[muja]

Unfortunately no, if I understand correctly the template is rendered per tag/version, so you can’t do any operations across versions.

I tried with$0 --context | jq '. | sort_by(.version)' | $0 --from-context - but that ran into #837

FYI we moved away from multi repo changelogs for now

[orhun]

Ah, sorry to hear that, it might get a bit tricky to generate a changelog for multiple repositories. #837 should be straightforward to fix though.