Making Debian Changelogs from Github repositories

One of the many things that irks me is the gap between good developers who put all their code on platforms such as GitHub, and those who then actually bother to put some effort into packaging up their code for easy platform installation.

I have come to the realisation that this is mainly due to the pedantic nature of packaging formats and platform lock in. One such example is the exacting format of the debian changelog...

GitHib2Changelog is a bit of code that I knocked together to help in this situation. It takes a GitHub repository URL and builds a debian changelog from the repository commits and tags.



By looking at the tags and commits it works out which commits are related to which tags (something GitHub APIv3 doesn't do) and then outputs this directly to you already formatted.

The service is built in php, and is web based with both a pretty front end and API access.

Ironically, since i've now committed the code to GitHub here I now need to use the service on itself and build the easy to install packages. More on that soon...