This post features work completed by @gustavovalverde
I started this because in the Zcash ecosystem there are many repos, and it’s hard to know what changed in a week, a month, or between versions across one project or many. The goal is to standardize change information from different sources into one format so you can understand what was added, fixed, or changed in a specific time frame, and compare changes across related projects.
What I built so far includes a CLI and core libraries that pull changes from releases, changelogs, and commits, then normalize them into a single output. I added category filtering so people can focus on important changes, and confidence scoring so the tool can be honest about output quality when inputs are noisy. I also improved parsing for different changelog formats, added a wider set of real-world tests, and built a basic web UI to view results.
Two key lessons were clear. First, input quality varies a lot, so normalization rules and tests are not optional. Second, users need a way to see when the output might be weak, which is why confidence scoring is important.
What I want from the community:
- Repos that break parsing or produce confusing output
- Feedback on categories, filters, and confidence scoring
- Suggestions for the CLI and the web UI, especially search and repo discovery
What I want to do next is turn this into an npm package that can surface change summaries during dependency updates, so you can see breaking changes before you update. I also want to keep improving search and format support. And also a cargo tool with a similar behavior.
Web UI: https://whatsnew.sh/
NPM Package: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@whatsnew/cli (to use in your terminal)
Repo: github.com/gustavovalverde/whatsnew