Software discovery: reno

Release note management done right

Today I’m pleased to endorse Reno: release notes manager. The tool is born by Openstack needs (large number of projects with large number of very important changes which needs to be documented, written by a crowd of loosely communicating remote-working guys). It has extremely intuitive behavior and I wasn’t able to confuse it or cause ‘WTF’ scenario. It pushes very little policy and it feels like a good universal tool. (And, of course, it’s a libre software).

Official documentation and the video, explaining how it works, are excellent and I don’t feel I need to retell them.

I tested in in our internal projects and it works magnificently. I also tested it in a separate repository, where I tortured it in all bizarre scenarios I was able to imagine (or remember, sigh…): broken conflicting rebase, reverts of commit reverts, merge reverts, crazy merge sequences, etc. In all scenarios it worked exactly as my intuition predicted, there was zero WTFs.

There is one case when reno may skip release note, and it’s a single known ‘don’t do it’ case, documented and articulated: Do not merge stable branch with release tags back into master branch.

The second policy it pushes to repo is use of tags for exact versions.

The third issue (not reno fault) is gitlab: if you use reno you need to make full clone of repo in CI (not just shallow clone with few changes).

Overall, it’s an excellent tool and I like it.