Have you considered using an external tool to maintain the NEWS entries, instead of maintaining it by hand?

Yes, we're actually also using GitHub's own tool to generate release notes (documented here), and they're shown on the release pages here:

• https://github.com/python/blurb/releases

In my own projects, I'm using a similar, external tool, https://github.com/release-drafter/release-drafter. I'm mainly still using this because it predates GitHub's own tool, and has some more options, and I've just not looked into switching yet.

But I think we might be okay with just the GitHub tool here. One downside is that generated changelog isn't part of the Git repo, but to be honest, I've not had any issues or requests for something to be in repo in my own projects. In one, I "retired" the changelog and pointed to the releases page instead: https://github.com/jazzband/prettytable/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md

Shall we just use GitHub's generated release notes?

I was hinting that we could use blurb itself to maintain blurb's changelog.

That's what I thought at first, then I interpreted "external" as not blurb :)

Sure, we can do, if someone would like to volunteer to set it up. It would be a good way of testing by dogfooding.

I'm ready for this change whenever you are! (And by that I mean we're blocked from releasing 3.13.0b4 until this update happens 😉 )

Will release right away!