Richer automatic release notes

[benclifford]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

The automated release process (introduced in PR #2612 and earlier PRs) does not produce any changelog information.

There is ample PR-level change level information available in commit messages and in GitHub hosted PR descriptions.

This information is mostly only available chronologically - for example by scrolling through git log (although git tooling does allow source-code based exploration of the log)

The PR template collects some metadata (and could be made to collect more) which could be useful for change presentation on releases. The template asks the PR contributor to describe which of four categories their PR falls into, and many users are primarily concerned with a subset of those categories (for example, asking "is my existing workflow going to break when I upgrade?")

The existing 4 template categories are:

• Bug fix
• New feature
• Update to human readable text: Documentation/error messages/comments
• Code maintenance/cleanup

These can be easily amended to suit ongoing needs in https://github.com/Parsl/parsl/blob/master/.github/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md

Describe the solution you'd like

Automated presentation in some form of changes by PR-template category - perhaps prepending the in-repo changelog or posting a summary elsewhere.

Describe alternatives you've considered

• This must not be a manual process, for sustainability reasons: the release-free period from January 2022 (1.2.0) to March 2023 (2023.03.06) is ample evidence that the Community is unable to sustain manual releases. By manual process, I mean anything manual related to release preparation rather than driven at time of Pull Request by manual work of the PR contributor.

• More tooling around git log to present things differently

• A separate changelog (see how globus compute manages SDK changelogs) - this adds a third place for individual change information text, and we should be reducing the number of places, not increasing them.

Additional context

Feedback for ParslFest 2024 and other places. cc @cms21 who has given some feedback on this.

I discussed this with @yadudoc while attending ParslFest 2024 and he was interested in implementing something like this.