Updating the Change Log

The CHANGES.rst file is managed using the Towncrier tool, and all non trivial changes must be accompanied by a news entry.

To add an entry to the news file, you first need an issue in Jira describing the change you want to make. Once you have an issue, take its number and create a file inside of the CHANGES/ directory named after that issue number with an extension of .feature, .bugfix, .doc, .removal, or .misc. For example, if your issue number is AAH-3543 and it fixes a bug, you would create the file CHANGES/3543.bugfix.

PRs can span multiple categories by creating multiple file. For instance, if you added a feature and deprecated an old feature at the same time, you would create CHANGES/NNNN.feature and CHANGES/NNNN.removal. Likewise, if a PR touches multiple issues/PRs you may create a file for each of them with the exact same contents and Towncrier will deduplicate them.

The contents of the change file is reStructuredText formatted text that will be used as the content of the news file entry. You do not need to reference the issue or PR numbers within the text, as Towncrier will automatically add a reference to all of the affected issues when rendering the news file.