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[lgoettgens]

This won't be in 1.3.0 unless it gets backported, so maybe the script uses master instead of the release-1.3 branch?

[fingolfin]

Indeed. This is because I am currently running this script from the branch behind this PR, which also targets master...

Ideally we would have completed this PR 1-2 weeks ago and merged it before branching, but that ship is sailed...

So now we should get this merged ASAP and also backported ASAP, then run the script from release-1.3 ... and hope the magic @aaruni96 implemented on my behest knows how to handle that case 😅 . Otherwise we'll have to run it manually with the appropriate arguments.

[fingolfin]

Actually the script may not be able to deal with this even in GAP, now that I think about it: there usually the branching and release of the x.y.0 release are done on the same time and nothing else is merged in between, so there is no need to handle this.

To handle this I think we need two dates:

1. the date the previous release branch (here: release-1.2) was created
2. the date the current release branch (here: release-1.3) was created

Then we want all PRs merged between the two dates, but without backport-1.2 label; and all PRs after the second date but with backport-1.3 label.

Does that sound about right?

[lgoettgens]

Wouldn't it be easier to get the PR numbers from all the commit messages in-between? This would handle everything and you don't have to check for backport labels

[fingolfin]

perhaps but then we need a completely different implementation, and e.g. need to fetch the entire history in the GH workflow. Also it is easy to mess up a merge to remove the PR number...

Though of course what I describe is only for the x.y.0 release.

For x.y.(n+1) release, we want to compare to the previous x.y.n release. I am not sure if the backport PRs contain the necessary information? But we can get the release dates for both tags via gh easily and query for all PRs merged in between and with the "backport-x.y" label

[lgoettgens]

For reading the changelog, I would find it way more intuitive if the pr numbers in each section increase instead of decrease. In the current setting it could happen that I first read how some function got changed, and a few lines down I read that it got introduced. This somehow feels to be the wrong way around

[lgoettgens]

I am missing a lot of PRs from the November/December period. Does the script handle PRs that were merged to master after the 1.2 branch off, that were not backported? My example I was looking for is #4339

[fingolfin]

I am missing a lot of PRs from the November/December period. Does the script handle PRs that were merged to master after the 1.2 branch off, that were not backported? My example I was looking for is #4339

Great catch! My original script supported this, but apparently this was lost at some point.

Indeed, I see this in the script log:

Base tag is v1.2.2
v1.2.2
Base tag was created  2024-12-13

So it only takes things "after v1.2.2" into account (i.e. the date of that release). But that's not correct.

There is an important ingredient missing from the release process compared to what we have in GAP and what the script expects (CC @aaruni96 @benlorenz): when branching off a new release branch, say release-1.3, in GAP we also add a (signed) tag v1.4dev to the first commit on master after the branch point (i.e. usually the commit changing Project.toml to list 1.4.0-DEV as version). Then this tag (resp. its date) is used as reference point.

An alternative is to just use git merge-base release-1.2 master of course.

(We use the v1.4dev tag in GAP also for the version shown in the banner, e.g. GAP 4.15dev-84-g4c8bd9f-dirty indicates 84 commits since the 4.14 release branched off).

[fingolfin]

A much simpler option for now (that GAP used in the past) is to just manually look up the value and hard code it -- that's the quickest way to get this working and we can look into a proper fix after the release is out.

(I've also added a v1.4dev signed tag for experiments)

[fingolfin]

I added the date hack and now #4339 is there