Missing change logs

[arsinclair]

As terrible as the change management in the TanStack ecosystem is, I cannot wrap my head around empty change logs.

• I'm upgrading @tanstack/react-query to a new version. I go to the https://github.com/TanStack/query/releases page and spend about 15 minutes jumping between multiple pages and trying to identify the concrete change trail in a single package. I give up.
• I discover that each package in a monorepo has its own changelog file. I open it and see

5.101.0
  Patch Changes
    Updated dependencies []:
      @tanstack/query-core@5.101.0

that's it. There's no information about what changed in the core package. Why isn't it copied here for ease of use?

• I go to the core package changelog and what is there?

There's literally nothing.

What is going on here? If nothing changed in the package, there should be no change log. If something is changed, why is it not published? Why am I forced to go and read the commit history just to be able to confidently upgrade the package upstream in my projects?

This repository has 50k stars. I don't believe it. I don't believe that a repository with such a high exposure and usage cannot get their change management fixed.

---

I have no idea why historically it is like this, I have been a user of this project for only a half a year. So I am sorry in advance if there's already a discourse in this area. But in my language and in my message above I'm coming off of a sheer frustration.

What's holding this from being fixed?

[TkDodo]

that’s because nothing changed!

for 5.101.0 specifically, we merged a feature for the eslint-plugin:

• https://github.com/TanStack/query/blob/main/packages/eslint-plugin-query/CHANGELOG.md#51010

but we want all our adapters to be on the same version, because it’s way more confusing to have core/react/vue/solid etc. all on different versions. That’s why sometimes, empty releases are created. 95% of the time, you will see changes in either react or the core release notes.

[arsinclair]

Thank you for clarifying the missing notes for this release.

But wouldn't it make sense to explicitly write that this is only a version bump to keep all packages in sync, something like this

5.14.0 (2024-11-06)
Note: Version bump only for package gatsby-plugin-cxs

instead of empty change logs?

The current approach makes it look like the change log generation is broken and causes confusion.

[TkDodo]

we don’t write these ourselves, changesets is handling this automatically. @lachlancollins FYI

[arsinclair]

Right, I meant the intent, not the implementation. If we reach understanding that this is not ideal, the implementation can be adjusted.

[harrysun2006]

The empty-looking entries are a changesets artifact rather than lost history. In this monorepo, a package gets a version bump with just a line like Updated dependencies []: @tanstack/query-core@5.101.0 when that package didn't change directly and is only being re-released because a dependency did. So a thin @tanstack/react-query changelog usually means the actual change lived in query-core (or another internal package), and react-query just followed the version.

For a reliable upgrade trail, the fastest thing isn't the per-package CHANGELOG — it's the compare view between the tag you're on and the one you're moving to:

https://github.com/TanStack/query/compare/v5.<old>...v5.<new>

That lists every PR/commit in the range across all packages, which is what you actually want when deciding whether an upgrade is safe.

That said — your frustration is fair as feedback. If query-core's own changelog is genuinely empty for a version where something did change, that's a missing-changeset gap: the release tooling only writes an entry when a contributor adds a changeset to their PR, so a change merged without one lands with no changelog line. That's a legitimate thing to raise as an issue (ideally with a concrete version where you saw a real change but no entry) — it's actionable in a way a general "changelogs are bad" thread isn't, and it's the kind of thing maintainers can tighten up in the release process.

[arsinclair]

Thanks, ChatGPT.