rust/doc/changelog_update.md

Changelog Update

If you want to help with updating the changelog, you're in the right place.

When to update

Typos and other small fixes/additions are always welcome.

Special care needs to be taken when it comes to updating the changelog for a new Rust release. For that purpose, the changelog is ideally updated during the week before an upcoming stable release. You can find the release dates on the Rust Forge.

Most of the time we only need to update the changelog for minor Rust releases. It's been very rare that Clippy changes were included in a patch release.

How to update

1. Finding the relevant Clippy commits

Each Rust release ships with its own version of Clippy. The Clippy submodule can be found in the tools directory of the Rust repository.

To find the Clippy commit hash for a specific Rust release you select the Rust release tag from the dropdown and then check the commit of the Clippy directory:

When writing the release notes for the upcoming stable release you want to check out the commit of the current Rust beta tag.

2. Fetching the PRs between those commits

You'll want to run util/fetch_prs_between.sh commit1 commit2 > changes.txt and open that file in your editor of choice.

• commit1 is the Clippy commit hash of the previous stable release
• commit2 is the Clippy commit hash of the release you want to write the changelog for.

When updating the changelog it's also a good idea to make sure that commit1 is already correct in the current changelog.

3. Authoring the final changelog

The above script should have dumped all the relevant PRs to the file you specified. It should have filtered out most of the irrelevant PRs already, but it's a good idea to do a manual cleanup pass where you look for more irrelevant PRs. If you're not sure about some PRs, just leave them in for the review and ask for feedback.

With the PRs filtered, you can start to take each PR and move the changelog: content to CHANGELOG.md. Adapt the wording as you see fit but try to keep it somewhat coherent.

The order should roughly be:

1. New lints
2. Moves or deprecations of lints
3. Changes that expand what code existing lints cover
4. False positive fixes
5. Suggestion fixes/improvements
6. ICE fixes
7. Documentation improvements
8. Others

Please also be sure to update the Beta/Unreleased sections at the top with the relevant commit ranges.