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DOC: Require PR author to add What's New entry #9676
Description
Description
Going forward (v4.1 and beyond), it is proposed that PR authors should add their own What's New entries as part of the original PRs. This is because having to compile the What's New entries right before a release adds a lot of unnecessary overhead, plus stress of unable to have the original authors add the entries in time.
Additional context
xref #9581
cc @astropy/coordinators , @bsipocz
Activity
astrofrog commentedon Nov 25, 2019
I would like to see this happen 👍 (I'm not sure what the right place to document this is)
pllim commentedon Nov 25, 2019
I am thinking contributor guideline, and maybe have bot logic to check for what's new when we add a "what's new needed" label on the PR?
bsipocz commentedon Nov 25, 2019
The only downside I see (well, there are tons of advantages) is that sometimes we weed out excess labels close to release, when we see what are the actual major new points in a release. However, what's news are not that long, we can easily remove the superfluous sections before releasing.
mhvk commentedon Nov 27, 2019
Should it be the PR author, or the reviewer? Advantage of the latter is that it has a more objective view.
Note that in principle the changelog entry itself should suffice - we could just ask for a longer one for things that are particularly interesting and then auto-collate them.
bsipocz commentedon Nov 27, 2019
I don't think a changelog would be enough, that would be nicer to keep that in a "telegram style" e.g "new timeseries class is added" versus a half a page summary of the new functionality showcasing the highlights from the docs.
eteq commentedon Apr 1, 2020
We should finalize this by the 4.1 feature freeze if we can so that it will apply to the 4.2 release cycle (can't post-apply it to things going into the 4.1 release)
eteq commentedon Apr 1, 2020
Some discussion from the dev telecon on 4/1/20: Instead of requiring it at merge-time, we say what's new entries are part of "features" and therefore the feature freeze deadline will apply for that. But we will revisit this decision after the 4.1 release and either close if we're happy or try this proposal for 4.2 if it doesn't work out.
eteq commentedon Apr 24, 2020
Since the 4.1 feature freeze is turning out to be a two-stage freeze (regular freeze for PRs, following week for reviews), I'd say the comment from #9676 (comment) applies to the second stage, since What's new entries might depend on the result of reviews (i.e., a PR that doesn't get in in time can't have its What's new already implemented).
astrofrog commentedon Apr 25, 2020
The author IMHO - if I know I'm going to have to write a what's new entry for a PR, it might make me think twice about reviewing it! But the reviewer can take a careful look at it?
pllim commentedon May 1, 2020
I don't think #9676 (comment) worked. We need to do a post-release post-mortem.
pllim commentedon Oct 22, 2020
How are we going to do this for 4.2?
bsipocz commentedon Oct 23, 2020
I don't see it's happening, so I'm removing the milestone.
hamogu commentedon Jan 13, 2022
I think this is also a good topic to discuss in the dev telecon since the discussion has stalled here. I'll put it on the agenda there.
astrofrog commentedon Feb 3, 2022
I still feel strongly that for obvious major new features the what's new entry should be added during the PR. Maybe this could just be a new checkbox in the PR checklist as well as an email to astropy-dev so that all devs/maintainers are on the same page. There's really no reason to delay it - we require docs and tests and changelog entries so this is just one other thing to require - no reason to procrastinate 😄
hamogu commentedon Feb 3, 2022
Discussed at developer telecon. These are the notes:
Changelog should be the what’s-new?Next steps:
Add checkbox to PR template for What's new entry
pllim commentedon Feb 3, 2022
Does #12813 kinda resolve this issue?
hamogu commentedon Feb 3, 2022
I agree. I just did not get around to open the issues about bots, but I see the @nstarman has done that in the meantime, so closing this issue. We don't want multiple issues open for the same idea.
Add checkbox to PR template for What's new entry