New automerge requirement: Release notes required for breaking package releases

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I think with the current Julia ecosystem, there are a bunch of heavily used, infrequently breaking packages that are nonetheless pre-v1. In fact, here’s 100 packages that are pre-v1.0 but have added an average of > 140 new users per day for the duration we have package statistics collected:

JSON, DataStructures, LogExpFunctions, MacroTools, DocStringExtensions, StatsBase, TranscodingStreams, IrrationalConstants, CodecZlib, InverseFunctions, ColorTypes, ChangesOfVariables, Distributions, GR, Colors, ForwardDiff, Latexify, Formatting, FixedPointNumbers, PDMats, RecipesPipeline, ColorVectorSpace, Contour, IniFile, StructArrays, FFMPEG, Measures, CommonSubexpressions, Rmath, Distances, UnicodeFun, GPUArraysCore, ExprTools, TensorCore, Parameters, CSV, FilePathsBase, HypergeometricFunctions, Unzip, Calculus, BitFlags, Interpolations, DualNumbers, GeometryBasics, Inflate, Ratios, CEnum, IfElse, SimpleTraits, AbstractTrees, LoopVectorization, TimerOutputs, ArrayInterfaceCore, StringManipulation, Observables, ArnoldiMethod, VectorizationBase, JLFzf, IntervalSets, DensityInterface, SLEEFPirates, CPUSummary, ZygoteRules, CommonSolve, LayoutPointers, JLD2, NearestNeighbors, HostCPUFeatures, PolyesterWeave, ThreadingUtilities, CloseOpenIntervals, KernelDensity, BitTwiddlingConvenienceFunctions, JuliaInterpreter, PositiveFactorizations, MappedArrays, SymbolicIndexingInterface, Widgets, ManualMemory, Clustering, CodecBzip2, Mocking, ExceptionUnwrapping, SIMDTypes, Tricks, ImageCore, Extents, CategoricalArrays, PaddedViews, CompositionsBase, CpuId, StrideArraysCore, Polyester, TiffImages, Transducers, PreallocationTools, PNGFiles, NNlib, RecursiveFactorization, Lazy

I think a breaking change to almost any of these would be fairly disruptive and users would benefit from release notes that indicate what the breaking changes were. There are 7k more pre-v1.0 packages as well.

code 
using CSV, DataFrames, RegistryInstances, UUIDs, Dates

registry = only(filter(reachable_registries()) do reg
    reg.name == "General"
end)

# Download and uncompress:
# https://julialang-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/public_outputs/current/package_requests.csv.gz
requests = CSV.read(expanduser("~/Downloads/package_requests.csv"), DataFrame)
subset!(requests, :client_type => ByRow(==("user")), :status => ByRow(==(200)); skipmissing=true)

function lookup_pkg(uuid)
    pkg = get(registry.pkgs, UUID(uuid), nothing)
    pkg === nothing && return (; name=missing, latest_version=missing)
    name = pkg.name
    latest_version = maximum(keys(registry_info(pkg).version_info))
    return (; name, latest_version)
end

versions = unique(select(requests, :package_uuid))
transform!(versions, :package_uuid => ByRow(lookup_pkg) => AsTable)

leftjoin!(requests, versions; on=:package_uuid)
disallowmissing!(requests, [:name, :latest_version])
subset!(requests, :name => ByRow(!endswith("jll")))

counts = select(requests, :name, :latest_version, :request_addrs, :date_min, :date_max)
transform!(counts, [:request_addrs, :date_min, :date_max] => ByRow() do n, min, max
        n / Dates.value(Day(max - min))
end => :request_addrs_per_day)
subset!(counts, [:date_min, :date_max] => ByRow(!=))
sort!(counts, :request_addrs_per_day; rev=true)
pre_v1 = subset(counts, :latest_version => ByRow(<(v"1")))

println(join(first(pre_v1.name, 100), ", "))

I agree more packages should move to v1+, but I don’t think adding additional restrictions for v1+ helps that. If anything, it makes an incentive not to move to v1, since then there’s additional rules to follow.

That being said, I’m not totally opposed to relaxing this rule. But my biggest concern with it is burden to package developers, not principles of semver.

What are the main issues with requiring release notes? It is a new workflow to some, that’s true, but JuliaRegistrator has been prompting for release notes for years, and JuliaHub has similarly had a textbox for it for a long time. Is it coming up with something to say? Or a mismatch between how folks are already doing release notes in some other way?

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