In fledge: Smoother Change Tracking and Versioning for R Packages

At least we think these questions could be asked. Feel free to also ask us questions!

But what if I want to edit NEWS.md manually?

You still can!

The best moment is between bump_version() and finalize_version(push = TRUE).
You can actually edit at any time, but only between those two calls the text in the changelog will be captured in the tag message, which is better for the tag history.

What if a contributor wants to contribute a NEWS item?

If someone opens a PR, with fledge the information about the changes should be entered in the message for the merge or squash commit. Now you could still advise contributors to provide a summary of the change as a comment to the PR.

Does this mean "Fix #42" will appear in NEWS.md?

If you want to fix an issue with a commit message you can

put "Fix #42" on a separate non-bulleted line or after a line with 3 hyphens.

- Adds support for coolness (#42, @contributor).

---

Fix #42

In a PR on e.g. GitHub you can link an issue to a PR by starting the first comment with "Fix 42" so the issue will be closed. The merge or squash commit will be hyperlinked to the PR, but the commit message won't have that phrase. You should still add an acknowledgement in the actual commit message e.g. "- Adds support for coolness (#42, @contributor)".