How release notes are created in Transformers repo

🤗Transformers
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Hi,

The release notes in Transformers repository are amazing. Fully detailed, well written, organized. It feels like nothing is missing, PR are linked, contributors are mentioned.

I’m trying to do the same for my repositories, but I’m facing some issues :

  • I’m doing everything manually. It means sometimes I forget a PR, or a contributor.
  • I do everything at once : when I make a release, I filter all the PR made since the last release, and summarize them in the release note. It’s time consuming, and I feel a continuous approach would be better.

So I’m wondering how do you guys handle Release notes at HuggingFace ? Do you have a specific process ? Specific tools ?

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Hi @astariul!

Thank you for the kind words! Release notes are an important part of the project, as mentioning each contributor’s contribution is essential: the project would not exist without these contributions.

In the past, we were doing everything manually, but, as you have seen, it is error-prone in a domain where errors are not acceptable. In order to mitigate this, we built a tool that scans all commits merged since the previous version, and formats them correctly. We’re left with a big list of contributions that can copy/paste in the release notes. I’d happily share the tool with you but it has quite a few flaws that make it unfit for general usage.

Then comes a second important part, where we do it like you do: we do everything at once, filtering PRs and grouping them in categories. This is indeed time-consuming, but it is important work. It serves as documentation, and as a guide for potential breaking changes. It is not unusual to spend between 1 and 2 hours on release notes, reordering commits in categories.

I hope that helps!

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@lysandre :pray:Thank you for your answer, that’s very helpful !

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