Rant / Request: Nextcloud, please fix the changelogs for App Updates

🏷️ General
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However, as someone who administrates a larger installation with a bunch of Apps and customization to the docker containers, the inconsistency of changelogs for the apps is driving me absolutely insane.

I agree it can be better. Some of the apps are farther along in this regard than others. There are essentially three camps:

    1. in-repo CHANGELOG.md is maintained (this flows through to the Changelog tab in the app store automatically)
    • e.g. richdocuments
    1. Release notes are posted with the tagged release (these don’t flow through to the Changelog tab in the app store unfortunately, but they’re always available under Releases/Tags in-repo)
    • e.g. groupfolders
    1. “refer to the the commit history” (these don’t flow through to the Changelog tab in the app store unfortunately)

Category one already meet your preferences (I believe). Category two could easily since it’s all there, but the transition needs to be made to start placing it into the CHANGELOG.md so the app store will pick up the contents. Category three needs some work surrounding the release process.

FYI, I’m seeing a changelog for Nextcloud Office in the app store:

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when I go to the Github repository via the “report a problem” link, I end up in the nextcloud/richdocuments repository that (at the time of the update) didn’t even contain the new release.

Some apps don’t have release artifacts posted in their repos because they’re not officially distributed from there (but via nextcloud-releases as you discovered), but there is always a branch or tag associated with a release within the repo itself containing the source code for the release. Depending on how backports are handled within a given app, you may have to switch branches or tags.

It’s not developed by nextcloud themselve (as far as I can tell), but is endorsed by them front and center as one of the biggest features of nextcloud.

Nextcloud Office / richdocuments (note: not richdocumentscode) is maintained directly as part of the Nextcloud project. It’s the integration app that connects with Collabora Online (which is separate).

EDIT: The recently merged user facing app changelog support may create some attention in this area too.