The Problem
It’s hard to see what recent changes have been made to an integration, because most of the interesting changes are done in an external library, and the actual changes to the integration only say “Bump pyfoo to 202x.y.z”
Proposed Solution
- Link to the external library in the Integration documentation sidebar, along with the existing links to the Integration github and Issues tag
- Automate including a Changelog or list of commits directly in “Bump” PRs
Prose / Longer Description
I have not yet contributed any code to Home Assistant. (I hope to find time to change that at some point.) But I do a lot of poking around.
One thing that I’ve noticed is that most integrations use an external python library to do their “real work”, and the code in Home Assistant is an integration layer.
This pattern makes a lot of sense, so I wouldn’t ask you to change it.
But everything is a trade off, and this pattern creates some challenges for me when I do some casual poking around. I am assuming other people are in the same boat.
The minimum I would do is add a link in the documentation for each integration to the library that it uses, if any.
For example, I was just looking at Litter-Robot - Home Assistant
The left sidebar has a link to github issues, and to core/homeassistant/components/litterrobot at dev · home-assistant/core · GitHub
But it doesn’t link to GitHub - natekspencer/pylitterbot: Python package for controlling a Whisker connected self-cleaning litter boxes and feeders
So the easier part of my feature request is to also link there. In a standard place on the sidebar, for every Integration where this pattern applies.
Reading through some commits (again, picking on Little Robot but I believe this is trust for most integrations), I see some in this format: Bump pylitterbot to 2023.5.0 by natekspencer · Pull Request #115856 · home-assistant/core · GitHub
Bump pylitterbot to 2023.5.0
Changelog: natekspencer/[email protected]…v2023.5.0
And I can click through and see a diff. That’s great as far as it goes. Way better than not having a link.
But I was reading through the commits of the Integration to try to get a sense of the direction it was going, and what changes were made recently. And this separation between the two repos makes that more difficult.
So the second part of my feature request is for version bumps to include a full changelog or list of commits in the PR.
That is something you would want to automate. (Otherwise, I’m proposing something that makes the lives of these maintainers harder, and I would not want to be responsible for that.)
Maybe there’s more that could be done to make it easier follow, but I am not sure of what. If this post starts any discussion, I do want to make it clear I’m more interested in the problem being solved then any particular solution I suggested being implemented.