Automate release creation on package version bumps

[koszti]

Description

Add a GHA workflow that detects version bumps in package.json when PRs got merged to main, generates a changelog and creates a github release. Keep the existing release.yml workflow to publish on release-created events so the release chain is fully automated after merges to main.

Additional context and related issues

We want a fully automated release: when a PR with a version bump merges to main, a GH release is created and a new build is published to npm.

[mosabua]

Wow .. that looks super complex .. I wonder if theres is a better way to do that .. in the charts repo it turns out we use a custom GHA - see https://github.com/trinodb/charts/blob/main/.github/workflows/ci-cd.yaml#L166

Feels like something like this should exist for npm projects.

[koszti]

Wow .. that looks super complex .. I wonder if theres is a better way to do that .. in the charts repo it turns out we use a custom GHA - see https://github.com/trinodb/charts/blob/main/.github/workflows/ci-cd.yaml#L166

Feels like something like this should exist for npm projects.

I simplified it.

semantic-release seems like the most advanced one but it works quite differently from what we use. Our current process requires manually bumping the version in a PR while semantic-release derives versions and changelog from strictly formatted commits and updates them automatically. Since we don’t enforce those commit conventions, semantic-release wouldn’t produce predictable versions or releases for us. But if you see it differently we can give it a try.