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Automated changelog generation (fhoekstra.eu)

submitted 2 days ago by fhoekstra@feddit.nl to c/programming@programming.dev

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When publishing a package for use by programmers, automated changelog generation is very beneficial. In this blog post, I explore how to do it in a simple way that works everywhere.

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[–] HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

What would really bring the state of the art forward would be automated checks whether a given interface change is really fully backwards-compatible or not. But this would need to catch changes such as

changed behaviour
removed functions, methods, enumeration values, ...
added exception types or error codes in return values, leading to looser post-conditions (client code needs to check for additional errors)
stricter pre-conditions
in libraries, upgrade to dependencies which include any breaking changes (because they can now conflict with other dependencies in a formerly working client project, and break these).

(Edit: There is a brilliant YouTube video by a guy called Rich Hickey, with the title "Spec- ulation", which talks about these foot-guns. Hickey is designer of Clojure, a Lisp dialect for the JVM, but his observations are independent of languages - it is all about APIs).

[–] fhoekstra@feddit.nl 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That is indeed a difficult problem. Integration testing and contract testing can help to avoid this, but one can never be 100% sure.

https://xkcd.com/1172/

[–] HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org 1 points 1 day ago

It is the whole topic of Rich Hickeys talk linked above that breaking an API is a choice. And it is not a solution to not define an API and not agree any contract at all.