Major overhaul of changelog retrieval

[viceice]

What would you like Renovate to be able to do?

We should do a major refactoring of the current changelog retrieval to support more datasources. Currently we only support GitLab and GitHub.

features

• Refactor changelog retrieval and detection #2987
• Support changelogs from bitbucket-server #3903
• Support "standard-version" changelog format #5181
• Display age/release date for updates #5822
• Optimize Changelog fetching #6171
• changelog for git submodules #7776
• Merge release notes #8177
• get changelog from npm #9061
• Defer changelog retrieval until pr creation / update #10921
• Make the Github-URL for fetching dependeny changelogs configurable #12042
• #12346
• Support artifacthub's 'artifacthub.io/changes' annotation for Helm release changelogs #13385
• Use NuGet Release notes #14128
• Bitbucket Cloud: include Release Notes in Renovate PRs #14964

known bugs

• Incorrect changelog entry #2960
• Release notes ordering issue #5574
• Changelog containing '</details>' breaks pr formatting #10143
• Duplicate changelog entries #13037
• Fetching changelogs from github.com fails when the source URL contains "gitlab" #13139

If you have any ideas on how this should be implemented, please tell us here.

Refactor existing code to decouple gitlab and github code.
Use base classes for shared code / functions.

Is this a feature you are interested in implementing yourself?

Maybe

[ZacSweers]

Would you consider support for running a script in the host repo to fetch release notes for "known" things that renovate doesn't necessarily need to implement itself?

[viceice]

Would you consider support for running a script in the host repo to fetch release notes for "known" things that renovate doesn't necessarily need to implement itself?

no

[tmillr]

What if there's release notes available on GitHub, but no CHANGELOG file in the repo/package (i.e. the release notes are not apart of the repo's contents/git objects)? Will renovate still pull release notes from the descriptions of GitHub releases?

[eric-labelle]

It would be great to be able to configure custom URLs for release notes sources where renovate could fetch it's info from.

e.g. For all Android Jetpack releases notes, renovate is currently unable to get the notes since Google publish all their releasenotest on https://developer.android.com/jetpack/androidx/versions

[shkm]

Is this the issue to track for Ruby changelogs as well?

[viceice]

Is this the issue to track for Ruby changelogs as well?

i think that should be a separate feature but can be tracked in list of this issue. please create a feature discussion to describe what the expected behavior should be.

[sereinity]

I would like to templatize custom changelog URLs (customFullChangelogUrlTemplate?) to use something like : https://gitlab.com/myorg/myproject/-/releases/scope-1%2Fcomponent-1%2F{{{version}}}

Context: we have a "monorepo" with independent release object for each component (here docker images), we choose to name releases with something like scope-1/component-1/v1.2.3 (gitlab replaces / with %2F in URLs).

Another way to match our needs will be to specify a release name prefix (by example: scope-1%2Fcomponent-1%2F).

[paymand]

What if there's release notes available on GitHub, but no CHANGELOG file in the repo/package (i.e. the release notes are not apart of the repo's contents/git objects)? Will renovate still pull release notes from the descriptions of GitHub releases?

@rarkins FYI, this is the situation for our private packages. We have no CHANGELOG.md file, but we have the releases on Github.

[KUGA2]

I am not sure if this has been mentioned before;
What about custom datasources (or built in ones) providing full urls to markdown changelogs? Can this be fetched?

I guess right now fetching is only supported from github gitlab etc because there is some knowledge of where the change logs for releases are. But if I specify the full url in the custom datasources json why cant this be fetched? Put the links (old and new version) in the PR and show a diff (old vs new) directly.

{
  "releases": [
    {
      "version": "1.0.0",
      "changelogUrl": "https://example.com/1.0.0/CHANGELOG.md"
    },
    {
      "version": "1.0.1",
      "changelogUrl": "https://example.com/1.0.1/CHANGELOG.md"
    }
  ],
}

Of course the underlying download step should take the settings in hostRules into account.