[VOTE] Creating release notes as part of PR merging process

[Marco de Abreu <ma...@googlemail.com>]

Hello,

during the release process of version 1.1.0, issues with the management of
our release notes surfaced. The current process requires the release
manager to review all past commits before a release and assemble a list of
release notes. I see two issues with this approach:

1. A single person might miss an important commit.
2. Issues blocking a planned release might be noticed too late.

While #1 might not look so significant, I'd like to encourage a community
approach and share this task along multiple people instead of putting the
burden on a single person. This reduces the chance of a commit being
overlooked and increases the chance that a person familiar with the topic
is able to rate the significance of the change. For #2, I'd like to refer
to the discussion about making the current release 1.0.1 or 1.1.0.
Background for the switch to a minor version change was the matter of the
fact that API changes have been missed and were only discovered during the
release preparation. In future, cases like this would be easily noticeable
by checking the future release notes.

I'd request everybody to vote for the following proposal:

"The committer merging a Pull Request must review changes in terms of their
significance for a future release and must add an entry (title and PR#) to
the future release notes in case this significance is met. Categories might
be 'New Features', 'Bug-Fixes', 'Fixed Security Vulnerabilities',
'Performance improvements', 'API changes', 'Deprecations' and 'Usability
improvements' (taken from [1]). The title of this entry might be subject to
change during the review process of the upcoming release. Active wiki-pages
for upcoming releases (major, minor and patch) must be marked as [WIP]."


I have created a wiki-page for the following release at
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MXNET/%5BWIP%5D+Apache+MXNet+%28incubating%29+1.2.0+Release+Notes.
After 1.1.0 has been released, we'll have to create another page for 1.1.1.
Any committer might add an entry in the style of
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MXNET/Apache+MXNet+%28incubating%29+1.1.0+Release+Notes
.

Voting time frame is finished 72 hours from now until February 2, 06:00 AM
UTC.

Best regards,
Marco


[1]:
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MXNET/MXNet+Release+Notes+Template