Fledge internals
In fledge: Smoother Change Tracking and Versioning for R Packages

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  collapse = TRUE,
  comment = "#>"
)

library(fledge)

Implementation

The following sections explain how things actually work inside fledge.

Updating `NEWS.md`

New entries are added to NEWS.md from commit messages to commits in master.

Only top-level commits are considered (roughly equivalent to git log --first-parent.) The messages from these commits are parsed. Only lines that start with a star * or a dash - are included.
If a line starts with three dashes, then everything past that line is excluded. Example: the following commit message

``` Merge f-fancy-feature to master, closes #5678
- Added fancy feature (#5678).
- Fixed bug as a side effect (#9012).
The fancy feature consists of the components:
- foo
- bar
- baz ```
will be added as below to NEWS.md:

- Added fancy feature (#5678). - Fixed bug as a side effect (#9012).

When retrieving the current NEWS for defining the tag message, the entries between the first two first-level headers (starting with #) are returned. You can use second and third level headers and add as many empty lines as you want.

Collecting NEWS

The first function to call at any stage is always bump_version(). This does the following

Calls update_news() to collect NEWS entries from top-level commits.
Calls update_version() to increment the version in DESCRIPTION and add a header to NEWS.md.

Tagging for "dev" vs. other releases

bump_version() continues depending on the release type:

"dev" releases: Calls finalize_version() to commit DESCRIPTION and NEWS.md. Also creates a tag with a message. You can always edit NEWS.md and call finalize_version() again. Both the commit and the tag will be updated.
Other releases: Calls commit_version() to commit DESCRIPTION and NEWS.md without tagging. In this stage, you can edit NEWS.md and commit as much as you like. The tag is created only after you use tag_version() manually.