Protokolo

Protokolo is a change log generator.

Protokolo allows you to maintain your change log fragments 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
• Licensing

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 v2.0 release, and v2.0 subsequently releases without merging that feature branch, then merging that feature branch afterwards would still add the change log entry to the v2.0 section, even though it should now go to the unreleased v3.0 section.

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

Enter Protokolo (Esperanto for 'report' or 'minutes'). 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.

See also

Towncrier is an older and more widely used implementation of the same idea. Protokolo is distinct in that it uses a directory hierarchy instead of putting all metadata in the file name of each change log fragment. Furthermore, Protokolo does no fancy formatting of fragments---what you write is what you get.

There are three main problems I encountered in Towncrier that Protokolo attempts to address:

• When using Towncrier, I would always forget which fragment types are available to me and had to look them up. These fragment types can also differ per repository. In Protokolo, the types are always visible because they are directories.
• Towncrier fragments are sorted by their ID, which is typically an issue or PR number. This isn't always what I want.
• Because (some) Towncrier workflows put the PR number in the file name as metadata, I would have to open the PR before I could create the change log fragment.

A much younger version of me also tried her hand at writing a program like this in changelogdir.

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

For full documentation and options, read the documentation at https://protokolo.readthedocs.io.

Initial set-up

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
└── .protokolo.toml

The .protokolo.toml files in changelog.d contain metadata for their respective sections: the section title, heading level, and order. Their inclusion is mandatory.

The .protokolo.toml file in the root of the project contains configurations for Protokolo that reduce the amount of typing you need to do when running commands.

If a CHANGELOG.md file already existed, make sure to add a line containing <!-- protokolo-section-tag --> just before the heading of the latest release.

Adding fragments

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

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

Note the bullet 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 fragments in the same section (read: directory) are sorted alphabetically by their file name. If you want to make certain that some change log fragments 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.

Compiling your change log

You compile your change log with protokolo compile. This will take all change log fragments 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 heading at compile time.

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.

Licensing

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.