It stores it in a “branch” that’s totally separate from the main branch, kinda like git-notes. We push that branch to our git forge like normal, so there are copies of it all over the place, and we can make a CLI tool if we ever want to.
That’s cool that you make it separate from the commit message and yet linked to it.
We also might need customer facing release notes at some point. But that shouldn’t be in the commit messages I think since it’s irrelevant in that technical context.
Yeah, I pretty strongly agree that it shouldn't be in commit messages.
A big consideration for us was that we didn't want to get in the way of normal development, and Git is a core part of that loop. By making the release note a thing that happens separately, we let devs batch that work before a release. But the tool displays the commit right as you're writing the note, so you can quickly see what internal-facing commit message you wrote at the time, and copy-paste if you think it's good enough.
It works really well so far.