[Contribution Guidelines] CHANGELOG Editing

[kevinmatthes]

I would like to discuss when to edit the CHANGELOG and by whom.

[kevinmatthes]

I agree that any noteworthy change should be documented in the CHANGELOG as exactly this is the intended purpose of this file. So I have no problem to not only submit the changes and / or fixes themselves but also the corresponding CHANGELOG entries, as, for instance, @mcobzarenco asked me to do for #62.

The problem I see is the time passing between the Pull Requests being merged. As I experienced, the Pull Requests are merged only once a week resulting in concurrent Pull Requests which all depend on the same unchanged state of the base branch. When one of them is merged, the others might receive Merge Conflicts due to the file state they depend on -- especially that of the CHANGELOG -- having changed: if two Pull Requests both introduce new features, their CHANGELOG entries will both be appended at the end of the current "Unreleased / Added" section and the one being merged at first will then collide with the other entry the contributor asked for integration for.

I would hence like to suggest to agree on a procedure to avoid such collisions. The required time to resolve the Merge Conflicts slows down the integration of new features and bugfixes.

[kevinmatthes]

• One option would be that the maintainer is the only person allowed to edit the CHANGELOG. Then, all Pull Requests could stay concurrent and would not receive collisions. The downside is that the maintainer would be forced to summarise all Pull Requests which not only takes time missing for development then but also risks the main idea of the changes to not being described. The contributors could also provide their preferred CHANGELOG entry as comment to copy and paste into the CHANGELOG.
• The next option is that any contributor creates a new Pull Request only for the CHANGELOG entries; at option also one per entry in case the corresponding change is not going to be merged in the same Merge Period. All Pull Requests which just contain CHANGELOG entries should be merged at the end of each Merge Period.

These are just ideas intended to fasten up the integration of new features without causing unnecessary Merge Conflicts.

What does the community think about those suggestions?

[kevinmatthes]

When achieving an agreement on how to contribute the CHANGELOG entries, we maybe should add them to the contribution guidelines that then also could become a file on their own.

[kevinmatthes]

#74 suggests an initial CONTRIBUTING.md.