--starting-date & --unreleased includes commits from before starting-date

[webketje]

Running the -u option together with --starting-date results in contradictory output because the --starting-date affects the date of tags and not individual commits: https://github.com/cookpete/auto-changelog/blob/5d914d4c58b52e12ad4679b3f16e984fcb64e02d/src/tags.js#L44 A commit that is not part of a previous release, but was made before starting-date will still show up in the output.

Use case
A repository previously not using auto-changelog where commits didn't adhere to a convention and cannot be filtered out using --ignore-commit-pattern (because there is no pattern).

Proposal

• Quick fix: Explicitly make clear in the docs that --starting-date looks at a tag date, not individual commit dates
• Better fix: Pass the startingDate filter to commits.js and filter on commit.date instead
• Maybe even better (but breaking) fix that would merge multiple args into --ignore-commits, which would be written as:

--ignore-commits "subject:^(dev|chore)"
--ignore-commits "date<2021-12-01"

Condition parsing can be outsourced to eg https://www.npmjs.com/package/conscript or can be limited to the format <prop><operator><value>, with just a few operators (><=!: with : meaning regex), eg to build a changelog with only 1 contributor's commits you'd do: author!<name>.

[andresjuarez]

Total agree!

[ollypolly]

@webketje Would this be considered breaking if we're adding another parameter --ignore-commits? I wouldn't mind helping with this as I'm looking to create a list of merged issues in my Changelog.

[webketje]

@ollypolly I believe this requirement does not justify adding yet another option (not to mention passing specific commits would be unwieldy, only a range would do). In the discussion at https://github.com/cookpete/auto-changelog/issues/228 I mentioned

I think the reason why a lot of these option feature requests exist, is because the --append-git-log and --append-git-tag options are not self-evident

I think (untested) most of the desired results can be achieved using auto-changelog --append-git-log "--since=2022-01-01" or any of the commit-limiting options documented in the Git SCM docs. But the best solution is to do the date filtering on commits and not on tags