gcg

README

GCG stands for Git Changelog Generator.

Rationale

Keeping a reasonable changelog is an invaluable asset for everyone who tries to track progress of a project or figure out whether their issue has or has not be fixed.

In Linux world, such changelogs are often embedded into packages, for example RPM has an optional section in the spec file (%changelog) and Debian versioning goes even further - it explicitly depends on a proper version information inside the changelog to build and maintain the package(s).

There are good reasons why the log is ideally maintained manually, you can read all about it at https://keepachangelog.com/en/

That said, it's not all black and white. A couple of questions:

• what if you spend a lot of work making sure your commit descriptions are telling the story; should this work be disregarded and repeated in the changelog?
• what if the reality kicks in, project members keep forgetting to update the changelog (or it is "yet another menial task")?
• what if you need to maintain the log in multiple formats?

If advice from keepchangelog.com doesn't address your questions, you don't want to tie yourself to a specific Git manager (like Github, Gitlab, Bitbucket) and as a project you're committed to maintain sensible Git commit descriptions - gcg might be just the fit for you.

Releases

At this point, gcg official packages are created and maintained only for Python; they're available via PyPI index: https://pypi.org/project/gcg

That said, unofficial packages for most common distribution formats can be obtained from the following repositories:

• RPM: https://bintray.com/weakcamel/yum-oss
• DEB: https://bintray.com/weakcamel/deb-oss

To use the DEB packages from those repositories, you need to install the Bintray GPG key; otherwise your apt-get update will fail.

For example::

# either of:
curl -qL https://bintray.com/user/downloadSubjectPublicKey?username=bintray | sudo apt-key add -

curl -qL https://bintray.com/user/downloadSubjectPublicKey?username=weakcamel | sudo apt-key add -

PIP

Only tagged packages are uploaded to https://pypi.org index, test versions will be made available under https://test.pypi.org/manage/project/gcg/releases/

TravisCI builds try to ensure the version (version.txt) is unique for each CI build by adding .dev<TRAVIS_BUILD_NUMBER> suffix for development versions of the package.

.. tip::

See also: https://packaging.python.org/tutorials/installing-packages/

Build

Prerequisites:

Base:

• python2.7
• pip
• virtualenv

To build RPMs:

• rpmbuild

To build DEB packages you need to set up Debian toolchain, which is not in scope of this README.

Build

We recommend you build this package using virtualenv.

To set it up, run for example:

::

virtualenv venv
source venv/bin/activate

To test & build a binary Python package, use:

.. code:: bash

python setup.py test bdist

RPM:

.. code:: bash

python setup.py test bdist_rpm

DEB:

.. code:: bash

python setup.py --command-packages=stdeb.command bdist_deb

Usage

To see available options, run as:

.. code:: bash

$ gcg --help

Existing templates

The gcg module of the application comes with some default Jinja2 templates to render the changelog information.

Current implementation does not yet support using non-standard output templates. The anticipated design would to be pass a template directory as a command-line argument, that's still to be determined though.

DEB template

Based on https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/#s-dpkgchangelog

RPM template

Based on one of allowed formats listed at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Guidelines?rd=Packaging/Guidelines#Changelogs