@tacaswell: would be great to hear matplotlib's perspective on this

SciPy did what NumPy does, considered the same problem, and switched to just putting release notes in a wiki page at merge time. It solves the pain points, the tradeoffs are:

• Con: it's still some manual work (not much, but probably more than blurb/towncrier)
• Pro: there's no tool/syntax to learn, so you can just ask any contributor "can you please edit this wiki page" and they know what to do.

Just to note, we discussed it a bit today, and while nobody seemed to have a huge preference, I think the consensus was to try the wiki based approach while probably editing the initial PRs post/comment to include a draft of the release notes which can be copied over easily.

EDIT: The reason for the PR notes, is that you can only place it in the wiki once it is actually merged (and it is probably good to have it there as well in any case).

Matplotlib has a PR to move to towncrier matplotlib/matplotlib#14589.

IIRC there was a lot of support for that as well on the mailing list. Lets bring it up tomorrow and unless Chuck feels differently, probably go for it for 1.18.

I noted that the dev meeting notes mention the fact that this will require using pyproject.toml. Note that this is not the case, and indeed, for matplotlib, we are putting the config in towncrier.toml (requires a flag when invoking towncrier; see discussion in matplotlib/matplotlib#14589).

@anntzer I would maybe prefer that solution, but I have not seen that towncrier actually added that functionality as of now (it does exist for python -m towncrier.check, but that seems not the correct incarnation?). Although... assuming we are right and towncrier does not support/check for towncrier.toml yet, we could fix that upstream I suppose.

I haven't checked in depth that the PR on matplotlib's side actually works :p just pointing out the discussion.

Matplotlib moved from PRs editing one file to one file per change for exactly the reasons in the OP (mostly the merge conflicts). However, the manual re-combination is surprisingly time consuming (hence why we are looking at towncrier).

With the wiki approach do you copy the wiki page into the main docs at release time?

With the wiki approach do you copy the wiki page into the main docs at release time?

Yes indeed. The process is as simple as asking on any PR that needs release notes to add an entry to (e.g. for 1.3.) https://github.com/scipy/scipy/wiki/Release-note-entries-for-SciPy-1.3.0, and then after branching copy the whole thing into a single release notes file. No machinery, no conflicts. It's quite nice.

I will close this, there may still be some bumps about towncrier, but it should be working fine (although with the current development version). And this was about the general thing, not specifics.