I think it would be nice if we could avoid the GitHub dependency here. For one, alternative forges (e.g. Codeberg/Foregejo, SourceHut, Tangled) have been growing in popularity recently. As an example, the Zig programming language recently moved to Codeberg.
One thing I really appreciate about this community is that we have quality, sovereign infrastructure like Hexpm and of course this forum.
We already have structured release data from the Hex packages themselves, and we have a standard changelog.md format used by many popular packages and by Elixir. The changelog.md file is often rendered into the docs; here is Elixir’s changelog.
Given this, there should be a clear path to:
- Scan hexpm for new package versions
- Pull the changelog from hexdocs or the package files
- Parse the changelog and pull out the section headed with the version in question
- Use that data to generate a forum topic
This way we would only depend on Elixir infrastructure and make no assumptions as to which forge a package is using.
