Feeds builder

[miniscruff]

A potential feature idea I have been thinking about is using changie to generate a news feed ( atom, RSS, json feeds, etc ) that you would then host and allow users to subscribe to. This would take some configurations and "append" entries for each release using the generated release notes into an existing feed file. Or it could generate a separate {version}.{feed name}.{feed-type} file as part of batch, that together with a feed template or header generate a feed when merging. ( Probably a go template file to be honest )

The output would be sort of similar to the GitHub releases feed but more customizable. See Changies releases feed or a preview here, to see your own projects feed the url path is: https://github.com/:org/:project/releases.atom.

Some vague hypothetical configurations could be:

# default config
feeds:
- type: rss
  path: docs/static/feeds.rss
  template: feeds-template.rss # golang template file relative to changes dir
  entry:
    author: "email of author, maybe org email?"
    title: "Release {{.Version}}" # go template, probably similar to version header
    link: "https://changie.dev/changelog/#release-{{.Version}}"
    # other rss entry values with go templates and data types like change format
- type: atom
  # same as rss but for atom values
- type: jsonfeed
  # same as atom/rss but for jsonfeed
- type: ?
  # technically, feed here is just a template file with an array of all entries generated
  # so we could use it for anything else as well

I feel like creating some sort of {VERSION}.{FEED-TYPE}.{FEED-EXT} file for each batch, then when merging, in addition to merging the release notes to the root changelog, merge the feeds into a shared feed would be the way to go. There is also the case of migrating existing config values into its own feed structure, like type: changelog/release notes/semver but it is kind of baked into how batch and merge functions with file names and sorting, so unlikely unless it was required to exist. For example:

feeds:
- type: release-notes
  changeFormat: "same as change format from root"
  componentFormat: "etc"
  # anything related to how release notes are generated

This change would be a pretty major breaking change if required, but to support both would not be too hard for compatibility reasons as it is just moving from one location in the config to a new location.

Anyway, all of this is just an idea that would take a fair amount of work and a bit of configuration on the project side. So, the real question here is, would anyone use this and should it be built and maintained? Also, it would be implied that versions built before any feed configuration was added would not have any feed entry built and you might have to write them manually for existing versions as all the metadata required to build them are lost in the batch process ( unless you use --keep ).

[llaville]

Hello @miniscruff

Here is my quick feedback that reflect perharps only one posisition (mine).

RSS may be a cool feature if open-source projects that were hosted on GitHub did not have a similar watch features solution since a long time now.
Personally I used it to follow new releases of GitHub projects.

[miniscruff]

Watch releases and the GitHub release feeds are great, but limited specifically to GitHub. So if you were using Changie for a service where your repo was private or not on GitHub for example, you won't be able to rely on it.

[sheldonhull]

Being able to show only the most recent release would be nice since github release feed doesn't do that. Could be useful for an organization github landing page and showing the most recent release from each repo instead of all.