Redmine

Have you tried the already available changelog-function of Redmine (i.e. http://www.redmine.org/projects/changelog/redmine)?
This function provides an easy way of seeing what tickets have been closed against which versions (versions which can be defined and configured per project by yourself).

Jean-Pierre Schober wrote:

a) many cases where you close tickets for futures releases today and want them in the next changelog nevertheless

The above-mentioned changelog lists afaik all the available versions which contains closed issues.

Jean-Pierre Schober wrote:

b) you have no ticket at all for a changeset.

I personally always try to avoid such situation. That is imho the moment (besides the eventual commit-log) where you loose control over your code. Do you (or worse, your successor) know several months later why in that commit line xxx has changed?
I always try to follow the principle of one issue per commit. That provides me of detailed info why such a line changed. This works at least best for me... :-)

Mischa The Evil wrote:

Have you tried the already available changelog-function of Redmine (i.e. http://www.redmine.org/projects/changelog/redmine)?

I know this function and it works great as long as you can ensure that every closed ticket doesn't belong to future version. For me it is quite common that we close tickets for release 1.1 for example while we are working on 1.0. Ideally you would change the ticket's version target from 1.1 to 1.0, but - you know - that's not always the case.
So the bug fixed today occurs in the changelog of 1.1 and I must work manually through the changesets to get the correct list. This step could be supported by Redmine. But perhaps this is only an edge case only relevant for me. If some more people may find this useful I would volunteer to create a patch for this functionallity.

Jean-Pierre Schober wrote:

b) you have no ticket at all for a changeset.

I personally always try to avoid such situation. That is imho the moment (besides the eventual commit-log) where you loose control over your code. Do you (or worse, your successor) know several months later why in that commit line xxx has changed?

I totally agree with you. But especially if you start a project or implement big features we have many times no ticket for a changeset.

+1 from me!

Would be quite useful for bigger projects (like Redmine too).

Redmine has a script to generate Redmine's changelog. Maybe it can be used for your projects if you modify it.

Please see source:trunk/bin/changelog.rb