Hi, I’m just curious if it’s possible to populate the change log field on the store automatically. I can’t find any flag in snapcraft(at least 2.43.1). Or maybe it gets the changelog from inside the snap?
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@renat2017 Currently, snapcraft does not support any directive to fill the changelog, it is only exposed in the dashboard UI and attached to each snap revision. Also, changelog is not exposed in any API that clients (snapd) could consume. Summing up, it’s not properly supported.
A similar request was already mentioned in Defining an API to allow upstream to programatically set a changelog.
As you might have already realized, there is a concrete need for a user-facing changelog text (likely in markdown) and it shouldn’t be exclusively related to a snap revision but instead to a group of revisions resulted from a single build attempt:
- On a known set of architectures (we know when it’s complete)
- From a specific source context (parts repositories hashes, branches and tags)
- In a particular instant (staged-packages and anything else not ‘pinned’)
We are calling this group a BuildSet in recent discussions.
Managing snaps on the optics of buildsets will vastly simplify publishers’ life by allowing groups of revisions to be referred by a familiar identifier (repo tags), promoted (channelmap) as a block and carry a consistent rationale attached (the changelog).
Summing up, proper changelog support will derive from buildsets being designed and implemented this cycle. I will try to keep this topic updated as things evolve.
@cprov thanks for such a detailed response. Honestly, it’s not a top-priority but just nice to have feature for me=) I was thinking that maybe I miss something and there is a way to fill that field by using the snapcraft argument or by having a file inside a snap.
I will track this channel and start using the feature once it’s ready
FWIW, I have another use case for this. I am working on a change to subiquity to let the user choose to update if there is a newer snap available, and it would be great to be able to display the changelog for the new version.
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Is there any update to this? A lack of user-facing changelog / news etc seems to be a glaring omission from the snap ecosystem.
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