Allow package selection in auto generated change documentation

[lukasIO]

The bot's check for the auto change detection is great.
The UI for automatically generating a changeset is also a great idea. In a monorepo it's just unfortunate that there is no way to further select which packages are actually affected. It will auto tag all packages in the repo with the same changeset.

It would be great if the UI would allow for selecting individual packages in this step.

Thanks for considering and sorry for all the issues raised recently

[dbanty]

Thank you for creating issues, it's great to have feedback ☺️.

The main challenge with the UI is that GitHub's Actions interface is really limited. I think I can put up to 5 buttons and that's it for interactive elements.

So for a more complex UI like selecting individual packages, I'd have to make a dedicated web page I think. Which would then require users to click out of GitHub to a Knope Bot interface, sign in with GitHub, and then make their changeset from that other page. It could have the advantage of allowing fork-based pull requests to generate changesets... maybe, not sure how permissions work.

That might end up being more clicks/work than creating the changeset with all packages, clicking over to view the file, and editing to delete/modify affected packages in GitHub's editor. So not positive people would use it.

Does having a dedicated web page for creating changesets sound like something you'd want/use? Or maybe there's something else you can think of that could help ease this process (use labels somehow, guess the packages based on the diff, etc.)?

[lukasIO]

Ah, that makes sense!
A dedicated website doesn't sound ideal for the reasons you mentioned.

I think guessing the packages by looking at the diff would be a huge improvement already!

Another option might be to take a similar approach to changesets where you get a prepopulated commit but you can still edit it before committing. That option would still benefit from a best effort guess on which pacakages changed based on the diff.

[dbanty]

Any chance you've got an example of that? I assume it's just a matter of crafting a URL in the right format that can pre-populate GitHub's file editor?

[lukasIO]

This is the kind of thing that changesets gives you

https://github.com/my-org/my-repo/new/lukasIO/feature/user_timestamp?filename=.changeset/brown-zoos-brake.md&value=---%0A%22my-package-name%22%3A%20patch%0A---%0A%0APR%20Title%0A

You can see it in action here the PR gets created when you click Click here if you're a maintainer who wants to add a changeset to this PR

[dbanty]

@lukasIO I added a similar link to failing checks from the bot, and generally reorganized the content in the check to hopefully make it more clear. Please try it out and let me know what you think (and if you find any edge cases where the link doesn't work 😁)

[lukasIO]

thanks so much!

This is a great improvement for our workflow already.
Would also be happy to contribute to the best-effort detection change if that's something you can see live in the public repo and/or are willing to explore in the first place