Use Semantic Release for this repo

[beverts312]

Semantic Release is a set of tooling popularized in the javascript community which can be used to automate various aspects of the release process such as versioning and release notes based off commit messages. For it to work contributors must use conventional commits for commits being merged into the release branch. The angular repo is a good example repo to see the relationships between commit messages and release notes/versions.

I would like to propose using this as part of the release process for this project.

Pros

• automated versioning
• automated release notes
• standardized commit message format

Cons

• we would have to enforce a standardized commit format

Work to implement

• Decide on tooling & conventional commit ruleset
• Modify release process to use semantic release
• Add a commit linter which can easily be executed locally and runs as part of the CI process
• Update contributing documention

[snskArora]

A few thoughts on this

1. Linter is already present as part of the CI workflow which runs on every push to remote
2. Instead of having a commit message-based release, it would be better to have a release workflow with a manual trigger (workflow_dispatch) to create a release and a release candidate tag on push to main.
   • Adding a tag of 'nightly' to every commit in addition to 'v{MAJOR}' would help in using the latest and latest-stable versions.
   • I will attach a simple bash mockup for this which I have used tons of time for POCs.
   • This should handle automated versioning as well and render the roadblock of standard commit message moot.
3. Automated release notes can be generated easily with a changelog generator, ex: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/release-changelog-builder

https://gist.github.com/SnskArora/a4771a284c7bfbb96ca06e576302a0ce