Release notes are captured during the development cycle from PR titles (or body blocks) using release notes labels with compliance across master and release- branches using test-infra/prow on the main Kubernetes repository (and future repositories later).
Releases are built and published by krel in this repo with the release notes published in kubernetes/CHANGELOG/CHANGELOG-x.y.md files.
The automated release notes gathered in this way are considered complete for alpha, beta and official patch releases.
For new branch, major milestones (x.y.0), the automated release note tooling provides a complete set of changes since the last major milestone release by referencing all alphas and betas for the minor .X. version.
This bootstraps a milestone release in CHANGELOG-x.y.md with a template for use by the Release Czar and the subteam area leads to further expand on the release notes with more detail as needed.
An example major milestone release (x.y.0) in CHANGELOG-x.y.md:
# vx.y.0
[Documentation](https://docs.k8s.io/)
## Downloads
binary | sha1 hash | md5 hash
------ | --------- | --------
[kubernetes.tar.gz](https://dl.k8s.io/vx.y.0/kubernetes.tar.gz) | `7deca064d2e277a0beed802c7cfe32d152434aed` | `0b735e8b9fd64064caa578d49062820d`
## Major Themes
* TBD
## Other notable improvements
* TBD
## Known Issues
* TBD
## Provider-specific Notes
* TBD
## Changelog since vx.y.0-beta.2
### Action Required
* This very important item to watch out for
### Other notable changes
* this bug fix
* that bug fix
* this cool feature
### Previous Releases Included in vx.y.0
- [vx.y.0-beta.2](#vxy0-beta2)
- [vx.y.0-beta.1](#vxy0-beta1)
- [vx.y.0-alpha.5](#vxy0-alpha5)
- [vx.y.0-alpha.4](#vxy0-alpha4)
- [vx.y.0-alpha.3](#v1N0-alpha3)
- [vx.y.0-alpha.2](#v1N0-alpha2)
- [vx.y.0-alpha.1](#v1N0-alpha1)
For 1.2.0, the release notes in their entirety were held up in a team-wide editing session that lasted weeks. This delay between the actual release and the publishing of the release notes was widely disliked.
Newer releases have the benefit of release note labeling and automated publishing leading up to a milestone release.
By providing this mostly complete set of notes at release time, we provide immediate value to the community and to users.
The templated portion of the release notes let users know that additional details on the release are forthcoming.
"Known Issues" can often simply be categorized as "Action required" and there's a release note label for that if your known issue is covered by a PR.
If your known issue requires more detail than can fit in a PR title, see the next FAQ item below.
If your known issue isn't tracked by a PR at all, please contact your area lead and cloud-kubernetes-release@google.com to discuss.
Use PR body blocks for expanded release notes.
You can add or update a body block at any time in a PR body prior to a release and it will end up in the release notes.