Do we want to check all the commit messages between the last tag and head for the Meta prefix?
If all are Meta we exit else we create a new tag.

If that's the case I have the fix stashed and I can update this PR with that approach.

Hey @suft, thanks for helping out with this!

Do we want to check all the commit messages between the last tag and head for the Meta prefix?
If all are Meta we exit else we create a new tag.

If that's the case I have the fix stashed and I can update this PR with that approach.

Yes, I think that is the behavior we'd want. Ideally we'd match the Meta prefix case insensitive.

Thanks @suft for your take on this. While this is definitely a quick fix for the problem, I do not find it optimal because it duplicates the logic we already have in changelog.sh.
In order to keep the code DRY I would prefer combining the two scripts into one, since tagging and releasing should always go hand in hand anyway.
I can offer to implement this, as I already have the idea in mind, but I think I won't have time for this until after Christmas.

@suft Thanks again for your update. The new version won't work, unfortunately, because the output of the tag creation goes to stdout, which means that it will land in the CHANGELOG.md file, which is not what we want.

Furthermore, the name of the script changelog.sh does not reflect its extended functionality anymore.

Now that I think more about it, though, I think the two scripts might still be separate, but we should only reduce the two workflows into one. The Tag step then should have the same if: steps.changelog.outcome == 'success' conditional as the Release step in order to execute it only when there are public changes. This will keep the code clean and DRY while still sticking to the single responsibility principle.

My offer is still valid, I can implement this myself during the next days. If you @suft are motivated, though, feel free to continue on this. Your effort is very much appreciated! 🙏

Another thing just came to my mind: there was a reason we had the tag and release actions separate, and that is we want to have the possibility to trigger custom releases by creating a tag manually. So the new combined workflow should also support this (i.e. triggered on tag creation and create tag only if it does not exist, yet).