Easier way to prerelease conventional commit based packages

[comp615]

We use the three step API interface to do our releases (version, changelog, publish), along with conventional commits. Our goal is to auto-publish off main, and to do a prerelease publish on every PR (for integration testing).

One thing that we've found challenging is that prerelease flow. (I come from a Lerna background). Our goal is to simply publish a version of every package that was affected by the PR, which seems simple. However the issue is that conventional commits overrules affected and means that the commits on the PR itself must have conventional style. Everyone here is a developer, and we all know that commit messages are usually ("did a thing", "oops", "again", "again final", "asljkdajkshd", "poop"). So we don't want to lint those and get in the way of DX. We DO however, lint our PR messages and what goes to main.

Is there a way to publish affected without using conventional commits? If not, could there be? NX internally has all the pieces and it feels like we are just trying to mix/match its internal behavior. (which maybe is also fine).

For reference, here's an abridged version of our flow:

async function getChangedPublishableProjects() {
  // This attempts to sync the affected command with what NX says is publishable via `getDefaultProjects`
  // https://github.com/nrwl/nx/blob/master/packages/nx/src/command-line/release/config/config.ts#L965
  const projects = await execShellCommand(
    `pnpm nx show projects --affected --exclude=tag:npm:private --type=lib --base=${CONVERGENCE_MERGE_BASE}`
  ).then((s) => s?.toString().split('\n').filter(Boolean) || []);
  return projects;
}

  if (!isMain) {
    // This block of code finds the intersection of the changed projects and the projects that are publishable
    const changedProjects = await getChangedPublishableProjects();
    releaseOptions.projects = changedProjects;
    if (changedProjects.length > 0) {
      releaseOptions.specifier = 'prerelease'; // This forces a version of everything, but it would literally do EVERYTHING if we didn't set projects
    }

    // We want to use a unique prerelease identifier for each commit
    releaseOptions.preid = `prerelease-${shortCommitSha}`;
  }

We're basically working around:

• Providing a specifier always releases everything
• Passing in affected projects requires matching the default release group, so if these get out of sync, it's wonky
• There's no "affected" filter to pass as "projects"