Protokolo

Protokolo is a change log generator.

Protokolo allows you to maintain your change log entries in separate files, and then finally aggregate them into a new section in CHANGELOG just before release.

Table of Contents

• Background
• Install
• Usage
• Maintainers
• Contributing
• License

Background

Change logs are a really good idea. Unfortunately, they are also a bit of a pain when combined with version control:

• If two pull requests edit CHANGELOG, there is a non-zero chance that you'll need to resolve a conflict when trying to merge them both.
• Just after you make a release, you need to create a new section in CHANGELOG for your next release. If you forget this busywork, new feature branches will need to create this section, which increases the chance of merge conflicts.
• If a feature branch adds a change log entry to the section for the next v1.2.3 release, and v1.2.3 subsequently releases without merging that feature branch, then merging that feature branch afterwards would still add the change log entry to the v1.2.3 section, even though it should now go to the v1.3.0 section.

Life would be a lot easier if you didn't have to deal with these problems.

Enter Protokolo. The idea is very simple: For every change log entry, create a new file. Finally, just before release, compile the contents of those files into a new section in CHANGELOG, and delete the files.

Install

Protokolo is a regular Python package. You can install it using pipx install protokolo. Make sure that ~/.local/share/bin is in your $PATH with pipx ensurepath.

Usage

To set up your project for use with Protokolo, run protokolo init. This will create a CHANGELOG.md file (if one did not already exist) and a directory structure under changelog.d. The directory structure uses the Keep a Changelog sections, and ends up looking like this:

.
├── changelog.d
│   ├── added
│   │   └── .protokolo.toml
│   ├── changed
│   │   └── .protokolo.toml
│   ├── deprecated
│   │   └── .protokolo.toml
│   ├── fixed
│   │   └── .protokolo.toml
│   ├── removed
│   │   └── .protokolo.toml
│   ├── security
│   │   └── .protokolo.toml
│   └── .protokolo.toml
└── CHANGELOG.md

The .protokolo.toml files contain metadata for their respective sections; the section title, header level, and order. Their inclusion is mandatory.

To add a change log entry, create the file changelog.d/added/my_feature.md, and write something like:

- Added `--my-new-feature` option.

Note the item dash at the start; Protokolo does not add them for you. What you write is exactly what you get.

You can add more files. Change log entries in the same section (read: directory) are sorted alphabetically by their file name. If you want to make certain that some change log entries go first or last, prefix the file with 000_ or zzz_. For example, you can create changelog.d/added/000_important_feature.md to make it appear first.

Finally, compile your change log with protokolo compile --changelog CHANGELOG.md changelog.d. This will take all change log entries from changelog.d and put them in your CHANGELOG.md. If we run it now, the following section is added after the <!-- protokolo-section-tag --> comment:

## ${version} - 2023-11-08

### Added

- Added important feature.

- Added `--my-new-feature` option.

The Markdown files in changelog.d/added/ are deleted. You can manually replace ${version} with a release version, or you can pass the option --format version=1.0.0 to protokolo compile to format the header at compile time (TODO: not implemented yet).

For more documentation and options, read the documentation at TODO.

Maintainers

• Carmen Bianca BAKKER carmen@carmenbianca.eu

Contributing

The code and issue tracker is hosted at https://codeberg.org/carmenbianca/protokolo. You are welcome to open any issues. For pull requests, bug fixes are always welcome, but new features should probably be discussed in any issue first.

License

All code is licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later.

All documentation is licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0 OR GPL-3.0-or-later.

Some configuration files are licensed under CC0-1.0 OR GPL-3.0-or-later.

The repository is REUSE-compliant. Check the individual files for their exact licensing.