Every time I upgrade my project’s dependencies using npm-upgrade and it cannot find a changelog I create an issue titled “Add changelog”. Most of them were ignored, sometimes maintainers answer something that means “fuck off”, very rarely they listen.
A good changelog answers these questions for the project’s user:
What’s the new value for my project in the new version?
What are the breaking changes?
How can I migrate my codebase to the new version?
Were my issues fixed?
A changelog is a tool that helps you decide to upgrade or not and to evaluate the benefits and the cost of the upgrade.
A good changelog is:
Written for humans, not computers.
Understandable by users, not just contributors.
Not a Git commit log.
Written by a project maintainer — don’t ask for a pull request.
You should read this awesome guide and add a changelog to your open source project today.