Chores section

When looking at https://github.com/conventional-changelog/standard-version/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md, I can see that there is indeed a Chores section, but it looks like I have to add an additional flag or something to generate it. Out of the box, I get no Chores section for my changelog generation.

Since the whole changelog generation is spread across thousands of repos (I’m exaggerating, but it feels much like it) conventional-changelog, conventional-changelog-core, conventional-changelog-cli, conventional-changelog-preset-angular and what not, it’s really hard and frustrating to understand and follow the codebase. Especially when trying to understand the README’s. As every module is linking to some other module which actually has the information I want/need (maybe).

I could not find a flag or something that I could add to the standard-version cli to generate the Chores section as well.

[Tapppi]

So I though about this a bit after @bcoe mentioned allowing a standard-version config stanza in package.json in another issue. This could easily be supported by allowing a preset option (e.g. "preset": "custom1" would use conventional-changelog-custom1 as the preset), as conventional-changelog looks for the preset as a normal package.

This would allow you to customise the opinionated angular preset by forking it (or some other preset), without introducing a ton of options. I think that is preferable to people forking the whole of standard-version to modify preset semantics, since standard-version doesn’t actually rely on them.

Thoughts @bcoe @stevemao ?

[nexdrew]

Typically, commits marked as chore do not end up in the CHANGELOG by default. Since the CHANGELOG file is always included in the published package, the idea is to strike a balance between including the important changes (in an easy to read/render format) and keeping the file to a reasonable size. If all changes were included, it would essentially duplicate the entire git log.

As @Tapppi mentioned, the only reason that chore ended up in the CHANGELOG is because it was also marked as a BREAKING CHANGE, which is a little odd but understandable.

AFAIK, there is currently no way to tell standard-version to explicitly include chore commits (or anything other than feat, fix, and BREAKING CHANGE). This is the standard/convention, and standard-version aims to be an opinionated tool that encourages the use of that standard/convention. If you want the commits to be included in the CHANGELOG, you should use one of these labels.

That being said, I agree it would be nice to allow the convention to be overridden or augmented via CLI option, but I don’t think standard-version is the tool to do that. (I also agree that the code is scattered amongst ETOOMANYPACKAGES, which does make it difficult to add certain features to standard-version, but, for better or worse, this is the current state of the world until someone - like myself - has the time and energy to change it.)