[rtsao]

I think the fundamental issue plaguing virtually all forms of automatic release note generation boils down to the mismatch of audience. Commit messages and even pull request titles are tailored to be read and understood by other maintainers and contributors, who are likely to be familiar with internal details of the project. Clear and concise communication for this audience might mean using more specialized jargon or referencing implementation details.

By contrast, release notes are meant to be consumed by a much wider audience, who are chiefly concerned with the externally visible aspects of the project. Communication tailored to other maintainers (e.g. commits and PR titles) is rarely also optimal for this broader audience. This is why commit-based generated changelogs have a bad reputation: commits are meant for contributors—not customers—and thus tend to be useless.

This also explains why a good, dedicated CHANGELOG.md is usually so effective: unlike commits or PRs, it affords contribution authors a separate place to write for a broader, different audience. Another nice property of this method is the notes themselves within the CHANGELOG.md can be collaboratively reviewed and edited right within the context of the PR. This is a very helpful mechanism to ensure that release notes are high quality and to distribute the burden of writing release notes to those most familiar with the changes (as opposed to the person creating the release).

I think the ideal scenario is that on a per-PR basis, the "external" release notes are automatically scaffolded from existing metadata such as commits or PR titles (or even sophisticated means such as identifying which packages have changed or knowing if a breaking change has occurred as a result of type interface changes) which are later refined/edited during PR review. I think it would also be great if GitHub Releases themselves could go through a review process akin to PRs in order to help ensure high quality and facilitate collaborative writing of release notes.