Explore changelog trailers for SAST projects

Proposal

Our CHANGELOG process is messy and often leads to conflicts between different engineers and Community contribution. One strategy to avoid this process is to mirror the changelog trailer process used elsewhere.

CHANGELOG updates are a pain for everyone and should be automated. This also enables a SSoT for capturing the change. I skimmed the docs and the gitlab-org/gitlab repo, and there seems to be an API for updating an existing changelog from commit trailers. This is the config being used by the monolith. I think this is the script that’s calling the API and committing the changelog updates. You can see the API call being made by the client here. One caveat is that we’ll all need to be more mindful of commit hygiene (good messages, rebasing where necessary etc.)

Links

• Approach: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/changelogs.html

• API: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/api/repositories.html#add-changelog-data-to-a-changelog-file

• Configuration: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/master/.gitlab/changelog_config.yml

• API call made by the client: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/release-tools/-/blob/27b5caeff3a3a84469d5abb1b0ace3e4e2ebe1f6/lib/release_tools/gitlab_client.rb#L559-571

• Conversation from team weekly (GitLab internal team members only)