Maven: A Developer's Notebook

Tracking Project Changes

When you're developing a project, it's useful to provide to your users a list of changes between the previous version of the project and the current version. This allows users who are expecting a feature or a bug fix to verify that the enhancement is in the new version. But even more important is the fact that you can regularly publish the progress report, which will keep your users and/or stakeholders spellbound!

How do I do that?

The first solution that comes to mind is to use the Maven Changelog plug-in. It extracts commit logs from your SCM and generates a report. It has a maven.changelog.range property that controls how many days in the past to look when performing the extraction. To use it, add it to your reports section in qotd/core/project.xml:

  <reports>
    <report>maven-changelog-plugin</report>
    [...]

After executing maven site you'll get a report similar to the one in Figure 4-14.

Figure 4-14. Sample Changelog report showing the last 30 days' worth of SCM commits

The problem with this solution is that commit logs contain lots of information that is not useful for users of your project. Actually, showing all those logs will make it close to impossible for anyone to find out user-related changes. Automatic generation of relevant changes is still a dream!

Thus, you need to hand-edit the changes to make them nice and clean. Maven has a nice Changes plug-in ...