changelog : manage changes on a server

Based on the Masters Book of Serious Sysadmin's Best Practices Chapter, this script aims at unifying and simplifying the management of changelog files on a server.

Crash course

wget https://this.repo.srs.ly/alban/changelog/bla/bla/raw/changelog
chmod +x changelog
sudo ./changelog

The script will ask for your name if no CHANGELOG_USERNAME environment variable is found.

Then it will ask for a first change informations:

• The nature of the change: which software / domain did you change? Why?
• Some comments: How did you do it? What was happening? Is it fixed?

Limitations

• Please note that to enter multiline comments, you have for now to escape newline characters using the \\\\n sequence. Ugly.

• By default, it will attempt to create and edit /etc/changelog. You better be running it as root, by default.

Possible improvements

• Enable a sudo requirement / ways to restart oneself as a root user
• Enable simple multiline comments
• Provide a way to attach files
• Provide a way (plugins?) to report each change to a central server