The approach I like to take is to curate issues and PR with semantic titles and organize them by label ("bug", "enhancement", etc) or linking PRs to an already curated issue. This way automation can use these to generate the changlog for me on each release based on closed issues and unlinked PRs since the last release.

We wrote Chronicle to do that automation for us: https://github.com/anchore/chronicle .

The nice thing about this... since you typically curate issues during the development process anyway, if you're doing that right then you get a nice looking changlog for free! We use this approach with our core tools, Syft and Grype (some changlog examples: https://github.com/anchore/syft/releases/tag/v0.31.0 and https://github.com/anchore/grype/releases/tag/v0.26.1 ).

Always happy to hear new feature ideas and possible customizations for Chronicle (put in an issue and let's chat )!