Fork rationale and north star

[TimothyJones]

This is a fork of the excellent standard-version. It was forked because standard-version was deprecated on May 15th 2022.

The previous maintainer recommended release-please as an alternative for those who are using GitHub actions. However, not everyone is able to use release-please - it requires GitHub actions, and the use cases are not completely overlapping.

This fork exists for those who can't switch to release-please, or who would like to continue using standard-version for other reasons.

I forked it because I wanted to ensure that it was still maintained - I've used standard-version in a number of projects, and not all of them can move to GitHub actions. When I forked it, I went through the existing PRs to see what could be merged.

The description of what standard-version does at the top of the readme is:

A utility for versioning using semver and CHANGELOG generation powered by Conventional Commits.

With this fork, I have decided to use the one sentence description as a "north star" to determine what changes to bring in. Some of the existing PRs to standard-version widened the tool to suit use-cases outside this sentence, so I did not bring them along.

This makes it easier for me and any other potential co-maintainers to commit to the maintenance of the project - for elaboration on why it's important for open source maintainers to say no, see this well-written post about why cross-env stopped taking new features.

I welcome contributions in-line with this north star - and if you'd like clarity before contributing, please feel free to open an issue and ask.