Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Goals

• Automate more of the release process
• Avoid merge conflicts in the release notes
• Improve the release notes of patch releases

By automating more of the release process, we move towards a situation where a release can be triggered by any maintainer, freeing up Eelco's time to work on important things.

Release notes automation can merge multiple files into a single release notes file, thereby avoiding the ubiquitous conflicts that would otherwise disincentivize the writing of release notes in the PR that introduces the change. Arguably the PR should document itself, and the pull request template already asks for this.

Currently, we don't document what's in our patch releases, but this is quite relevant to users. I suppose doing this wasn't considered worthwhile, but it would help users quite a bit; especially those experiencing the bugs or doing the packaging in Nixpkgs.

Describe the solution you'd like

• contributors add a new file to a specific directory in each pr
• at release time,
  • for a patch release, the release script appends the files in that directory to the existing rl-${version} file
  • for a non-patch release, the release script creates a new file with all the items from those files
  • after the concatenation / write step, it removes the original files, as their contents have been processed. This is helpful because it makes the patch release automation work.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Keep burdening Eelco (minor releases) and users (patch releases) with the task of digging through commit logs.

We might want to do a final review of release notes, but moving this work forward as suggested above should be more productive anyway.

Additional context
Add any other context or screenshots about the feature request here.

Priorities

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