What will it do?

[certik]

Is this meant to help with pull requests? That would be an excellent idea.

[asmeurer]

Yeah, I've been sprinting on it at SciPy.

The goal is to do the release notes (the idea originally at https://github.com/sympy/sympy/pull/13584). The idea is that people will write the release notes in the PR description, and the bot will automatically add it to the notes on the wiki when it is merged. The advantage there is that reviewers can edit the notes because they are just in the description, and they can also easily be edited afterwords on the wiki.

I just spent about a month compiling https://github.com/sympy/sympy/wiki/Release-Notes-for-1.2 from the 600+ PRs that were merged since 1.1.1, so this is something that needs to be automated in some way.

I was originally going to just do this with Travis, but I think it would be nicer to have a separate bot that can give instant feedback.

But I figured I might as well just call it SymPy Bot because it could easily be made to do other things as well, once I figure out how Heroku works (there is a good tutorial at https://github-bot-tutorial.readthedocs.io/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwvjtCjimiw&feature=youtu.be). I'm slugging through it so far because it's all new to me, but it should get up and running eventually.

If you have any suggestions feel free to open issues or PRs (I can also give you access on Heroku).

[certik]

What do you think of the approach GitLab took:

https://about.gitlab.com/2018/07/03/solving-gitlabs-changelog-conflict-crisis/

(I thought last time we talked about it, we agreed to have a directory and simply add a new file per PR with the changelog/release note, and then just have a script that takes all these files and merges it during release.)

[asmeurer]

Yes, that is very similar to what xonsh does (and what I originally proposed).

The idea to put them in the PR description was suggested at https://github.com/sympy/sympy/pull/13560, and I discussed the pros and cons of each option at https://github.com/sympy/sympy/issues/10942#issuecomment-342628190.

Here are the benefits of this idea:

• The PR author can modify the changelog without pushing anything to the branch. So it keeps the history cleaner.
• It is also much simpler to just add something to the PR description than to make a new file in the repo.
• GitHub automatically compiles the markdown, so you can see how it will look
• Reviewers can edit the changelog too
• With this bot, they will receive instant feedback if they forget the entry or it isn't formatted correctly, rather than waiting on Travis.
• We can keep the changelog on the wiki. This means links won't change. And it also makes it very easy to modify the changelog after a PR is merged

The only real downside is that it requires more tooling, which is basically this bot. But I'm committed to building out what is needed.

[certik]

@asmeurer I see. Yes, that sounds like a good idea. The wiki is a git repository also, so it's all archived. Although we should probably get into a habit of periodically pulling the wiki git repository, in case github lost it (I know it's unlikely).