Omero.server 5.6.17 release notes

[sbesson]

e2b9633 adds the --generate-notes flag to the command generating a GitHub release on tags
e85f3e0 adds an initial set of release notes for the upcoming release of OMERO.server 5.6.17

OMERO.py will be released later today or Monday and has been included in the builds lately. Depending on the timeline for OMERO.web 5.31.0 we might release and announce everything together to enforce the recommendation on Python 3.10+ / Django 5.2 @knabar

[pwalczysko]

adds the --generate-notes flag to the command generating a GitHub release on tags

I am a bit confused by the fact that the notes are being generated already (?), see https://github.com/ome/openmicroscopy/releases ?
Not that it is necessarily something bad, I have built from this branch on my fork and I have some notes generated too, albeit quite outdated ones, see https://github.com/pwalczysko/openmicroscopy/releases

[pwalczysko]

The slash and the tmp are split for me on different lines.

[pwalczysko]

The notes look good, it is just that I have no idea why were they added manually... Possibly I am making a wrong reference to repos like

[sbesson]

I am a bit confused by the fact that the notes are being generated already (?), see https://github.com/ome/openmicroscopy/releases ?

I think these were generated by hand after the Github release was created by clicking the Generate notes button. This simply reduces the number of operations and aligns with other repositories

[pwalczysko]

and aligns with other repositories

Yes, thanks, and sorry, I was first happy with the answer, but on a second thought.

The other repositories such as https://github.com/ome/omero-figure which does have the --generate-notes flag do not have any history.rst file. Why is it necessary to create this file in the first step ?

[sbesson]

The other repositories such as https://github.com/ome/omero-figure which does have the --generate-notes flag do not have any history.rst file. Why is it necessary to create this file in the first step ?

A few reasons for that:

• this file is currently used for generating https://github.com/ome/omero-documentation/blob/develop/omero/users/history.rst via an automatic workflow. Changing this paradigm would require to review this strategy
• the generated notes are based on PRs against that repository
  • for applications like OMERO.figure, all relevant PRs are opened against a single repository, the generated notes can give a good idea of the changes - although note the discussion at Replace manual changelog by automated GH release step omero-figure#649
  • for OMERO.server, changes span multiple repositories and there is zero information in these PR titles about the fact Bio-Formats has been bumped to 8.4.0 for instance
• generated notes aggregate PR metadata and will reflect the quality of these. All the PRs bumping component versions are automatically generated by an agent with the same generic Update dependencies title

From my side, generating GitHub release notes is useful as it allows to quickly generate a representation of all PRs associated with a given tag. However, the current content does not meet the expectations of proper user-facing release notes describing the set of relevant changes and that can be used e.g. for the website announcement. OMERO is adopting the same worklow as Bio-Formats with a single file containing user-facing notes that is amended manually and reviewed on release.

[pwalczysko]

Thanks for the explanation @sbesson .