Detect if release is necessary, exit if not

semantic-release has a sweet way of detecting whether or not it should follow through with a release. Some commits are just docs, style, and even refactor, that don’t really affect the published build, hence a release shouldn’t really take place. Currently, standard-version tags the release regardless of what the commits are – for commits that don’t affect the build, standard-version bumps the version number as a patch. We use standard-version at work for our CI builds and it works great for publishing to our internal registry, but it overpopulates our registry with unnecessary releases. The same with Bitbucket and unnecessary release tags.

Is this a viable feature that can be implemented into standard-version? Or is always releasing the correct behavior and should always be expected?

[bcoe]

@stevemao I could see an argument for having a --force option, that creates a release even if there’s no changes in the history (which is something I sometimes do). Perhaps the default behavior could be to warn and exit though? (with a tip as to how to use --force).

@enriquecaballero what do you think? (also sorry for this incredibly slow reply).

[rodoabad]

Is this going to be a feature in the future? This is handy for CI especially when your CI pushes tags and commits back to Git. This will cause an endless cycle as each push will trigger a new version that’s going to push a new change log again and so on.