CHANGELOG.md on main branch is empty, breaking automated changelog detection tools

[Flo0807]

Problem

The CHANGELOG.md on the main branch currently contains no entries. It just says "Nothing, so far" for v1.2 and refers readers to the v1.1 branch. The actual changelog content lives on version-specific branches (e.g. v1.1).

This breaks tools like https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate that automatically include changelog entries in dependency update PRs/MRs. Renovate fetches CHANGELOG.md from the repository's default branch and parses it for relevant version entries. Since the main branch has an empty file, no changelog is included in update descriptions.

Suggested Fix

Keep a consolidated CHANGELOG.md on the main branch that includes entries for all released versions (or at minimum, the currently supported release branches) like most Elixir packages do (e.g. Phoenix, Ecto, LiveDashboard).

Workaround

Renovate users can override the changelog location in their config:

{
  "packageRules": [
    {
      "matchPackageNames": ["phoenix_live_view"],
      "changelogUrl": "https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix_live_view/blob/v1.1/CHANGELOG.md"
    }
  ]
}

This needs to be updated manually each time LiveView moves to a new major/minor release branch.

References

• Renovate's changelog detection: https://docs.renovatebot.com/key-concepts/changelogs/

[SteffenDE]

Thanks for bringing this up. I don't want to keep all versions in the changelog, but Renovate also says

Checking for both "Releases" metadata

so we could have a GitHub action to create a release for each versioned tag with the parts of the changelog. If someone wants to look into that, I'd be happy to review a PR :)

[Flo0807]

so we could have a GitHub action to create a release for each versioned tag with the parts of the changelog. If someone wants to look into that, I'd be happy to review a PR :)

Sure. I've submitted a PR! 🙂