For GitHub-hosted projects there's a particular simple release autoupdate scheme. Just provide at least one link to your github-repo (as primary Autoupdate URL, Homepage, Download or in Other URLs).

A projects tags.atom will be polled daily for version number updates.

• Version number prefixes like "v" and projname- prefixes will be stripped from tags.
• Only the 1.2.3* style version number will be retained from tags.
• Release titles are generally ignored.

Three different methods are tried to extract release news then:

1. http://github.com/$user/$project/releases is the preferred way to retrieve a changelog. The first bulleted task-list will be presumed to be individual change notes.

   

   This is what GitHub itself recommends for publishing releases. Albeit only major projects are utilizing it, e.g. /atom/atom.

2. Alternatively a * bulleted list from tags.atom <content> will be used.

   So you can have your commit message for a tag contain a changelog-style summary.

3. As fallback $repo/compare/0.9.9...1.0.0 will be used for condensing commit logs into a summary.

   This is obviously not often a user-friendly changelog. Therefore it's rate limited. Which might incur delayed bugfix release announcements.

   For projects where this fallback repeatedly only generates developer/commit changelogs, it'll probably be moderated and disabled.

Some basic filtering (removing "merged pull request xyz" entries) is applied.

State: functional, testing