we use https://github.com/anchore/chronicle to generate release notes in a changelog format using the issues and PRs from GitHub as the source of truth. In this way time well spent in the curation of issues and PRs (which is something we need to do anyway) means that we automatically get release notes for free. (disclaimer: I'm the author of chronicle)

The approach I like to take is to curate issues and PR with semantic titles and organize them by label ("bug", "enhancement", etc) or linking PRs to an already curated issue. This way automation can use these to generate the changlog for me on each release based on closed issues and unlinked PRs since the last release.

We wrote Chronicle to do that automation for us: https://github.com/anchore/chronicle .

The nice thing about this... since you typically curate issues during the development process anyway, if you're doing that right then you get a nice looking changlog for free! We use this approach with our core tools, Syft and Grype (some changlog examples: https://github.com/anchore/syft/releases/tag/v0.31.0 and https://github.com/anchore/grype/releases/tag/v0.26.1 ).

Always happy to hear new feature ideas and possible customizations for Chronicle (put in an issue and let's chat )!

It does two things for you: a) you get to visualize and explore the image layer by layer, and b) it will analyze and score the image with a % efficiency, listing all of the potential "inefficient" files.

In this way it's not just showing you a score... the score doesn't help you make the image any better. This is why letting the user explore the layers is good, to help discover and explain why there is an inefficiency (not just that there is one).