Hi all, Looking a bit ahead with respect to releases and (semi) automatic releases:
We have a script that automatically collects the code changes from the Git log and adds it to the release-notes. While PRs usually have some meaningful information in the description, that information is often lost in the merged commits.
The Polaris project uses the GitHub default to populate the commit message for the "squash and merge" option from the messages of all commits in the PR.
The easiest way to get the "meaningful" information from the PR description into the Github-proposed message is to have that in the branch for the PR - if that branch has only one commit. In other words: when you open a PR and have only one commit in the PR branch, that commit's subject and message are used to populate the PR summary + description.
For the (generated) release-notes and the Git commit log in general having the actual description of the changes is very valuable.
Please take the time _before_ hitting "squash and merge" and check & update the subject and message fields. It's not much work but brings a lot of value later. Remove the irrelevant messages from the "intermediate commits" (like "test fix" or "make it compile") and help people who later look at the Git log by having the relevant parts of the PR summary+description included in the merged commit.
For "release managers" it's probably quite a lot of unnecessary work to do this in hindsight and inspect every PR.
Robert -- Robert Stupp @snazy
