Add option to refuse to generate a version if the changelog would be empty about commit-and-tag-version

[TimothyJones]

Apologies for the slow reply.

Yes, this behaviour is expected. When you run the tool, you are asking for a release to be made. If there are no commits that would end up in the changelog, then a release is made incrementing only the patch version.

Personally, this isn't my preferred behaviour - I don't personally want to release if there would be no release notes - because either you missed documenting something in the changelog, or there's nothing that's worth releasing to users.

However, there's currently no option that will allow you to stop a release if there are no changelog changes.

In another project (which used standard-version before it was forked here), I wrote a bit of bash to do a dry run and check the release notes. You can find it here. The relevant part is:

RELEASE_NOTES="$(npx commit-and-tag-version --dry-run | awk 'BEGIN { flag=0 } /^---$/ { if (flag == 0) { flag=1 } else { flag=2 }; next } flag == 1')"
# Don't release if there are no changes
if [ "$(echo "$RELEASE_NOTES" | wc -l)" -eq 1 ] ; then
    error "This release would have no release notes. Does it include changes?"
    echo "   - You must have at least one fix / feat commit to generate release notes"
    echo "*** STOPPING RELEASE PROCESS ***"
    exit 1
fi

It works, but it relies on the log output, which is obviously not ideal.

I think a "don't release if no changelog changes" flag would be a good feature to add.