Release notes: exclude closed PRs with version labels?

[pcsanwald]

The release notes generation script doesn't include filtering for PRs that are closed, as opposed to merged. This is a problem, because it means that the person generating the release notes needs to somehow check every PR to ensure it's actually merged, and not closed, or, alternatively, the release notes could contain an unmerged PR.

This means that a command like this:

docker run \
  --rm \
  -it \
  -v $HOME/.elastic/github.token:/root/.github_auth \
  -v $PWD:/elasticsearch \
  docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch-infra/dev-tools:latest \
  bash -c "/elasticsearch/dev-tools/es_release_notes.pl v7.2.0 > /elasticsearch/docs/reference/release-notes/7.2.0.asciidoc"

generates a release notes file that contains these closed, unmerged pull requests:

#41488
#38504
#40047
#41799
#43910

which were all closed, as opposed to being merged. To avoid this, we could update the script to filter by is:merged or similar. That would leave us with PRs that were closed, but did have a version label, which could be less than ideal; because those version labels are then "incorrect" if we want to use the version label as a single source of truth. Is there a reason why we don't filter by is:merged today? As an alternative solution, could we handle this in the relabel step, which could remove version labels for closed PRs?

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/es-docs

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/es-delivery (Team:Delivery)

[pugnascotia]

We don't use that script, we can't close this.