Hmmm, re https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/pull/21259 : When cherrypicking back to a release branch, what is the policy re release notes? For example, in the original PR the release notes were updated in docs/notes/2.23.x.md, which of course makes sense. But when cherrypicking that file doesn’t exist in the older release branch. So do we manually write the update into that branch’s release notes? And if so, do we update the same files in the later branches and in the main branch? In that case we would have the same update in multiple files.

We did land my change to delete “future” release notes from the cherry pick.

From a user's perspective, if https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/pull/21268 lands in 2.22.0, that'll be is the first time that feature/bugfix is going out in a .0 stable release, so having release notes there seems like it would be good. All of this requires manual effort, at the moment, so maybe for a small thing like that we just say "good enough", mark as

release-notes:not-required

and move on. Relevant prior discussion about how the release notes might evolve, including this case: • https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/pull/20850 "problems" & "future work" • https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/discussions/20888#discussioncomment-9361632 • https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/discussions/19247

Yeah, but what about, say, 2.21.4? This change could be the only reason we’re releasing that version, but it’s not in the release notes…

as along as the bot can open a PR for the cherry pick, someone can always just push to the PR's branch to edit the release notes

Yeah, but what about, say, 2.21.4? This change could be the only reason we’re releasing that version, but it’s not in the release notes…

For those releases, my intuition is that the 2.21.x.md release note files aren't as useful: it's not obvious what's a change from 2.21.3 -> 2.21.4 in amongst all the other content. Thus it matters less. The cherrypicks do automatically appear in the GitHub release summaries though, which seems like a more useful location. 🤷

CPython release notes sometimes include a "notable changges in 3.X.Y" section in the 3.X release notes if need be but omit it if not needed. for example https://docs.python.org/3.11/whatsnew/3.11.html#notable-changes-in-3-11-4