Better changelog / release notes support

[jpnelson]

Currently the changelog is generated as a file in the repository, which complicates the release process – to get the changelog file published to NPM correctly, we need to do the post step before the perform step, which is not how it should be.

Ideally instead, we would be able to publish release notes summaries instead. Github has a releases API which we could support, and to enable bitbucket support, we can make it agnostic to where it posts these changelogs to – it could be bitbucket snippets, or a third party changelog hosting service.

[vovacodes]

I don't think the current approach is bad, the naming is simply not appropriate (post). I would call it generate-changelog. All this pre-perform-post are too opinionated IMO. Adding Releases API support is a good thing though, but as an extra, not instead.

[jpnelson]

I agree, particularly since the current recommended order is pre / post / perform – I'd like to stick closely to how semantic-release does the naming if that is possible somehow

[vovacodes]

It is nice to have some predefined set of actions like pre / post / perform, but the reality is that the environments people work in are different so release process might divert a lot from team to team. The approach semantic-release takes seems to be too opinionated to me. That is the reason why they still cannot work with GitLab or Bitbucket. I would rather have a set of "semantic" tools for lerna that I could use to assemble my release process from. I like the way conventional-changelog is organized. They have a bunch of tools (changelog generation, github releases, version bump, etc.) each of which has a narrow scope of responsibility that allows them to be easily composed together for a precisely tailored release process. @jpnelson what is your opinion on this?