RFC: the perfect release process

[ekohl]

First of all, for this effort.

@evgeni

the release process is documented in a dedicated file – release.md or releasing.md in either the repository root or in the documentation subfolder:

Yes please. Documenting the steps is the first step to automating them.

Over time I wouldn’t mind having some common process documented somewhere (like on theforeman.org) and the release.md file just points to that.

Some implementation detail: I’d prefer not to have this file end up in release artifacts (like gems). Otherwise we need to deal with it in packaging (RPM/deb). There’s also a tiny saving on size (both storage and transfer).

@evgeni

there is a single command to prepare the release metadata

I suggested this in the past:

Standard tool to do version bumps

Hello everyone, I’d like to introduce tooling to do version bumps of projects. Currently we have a lot of projects that do bumps in slightly different ways. By using a tool that has config in the projects git repository it’ll be standardized. Personally I like bump2version. Maybe because I’m one of the maintainers or that it’s packaged in Fedora. Either way, you can add a config: Then it’s simply bumpversion patch (or minor/major). My question is: which tool do people prefer.

@evgeni

Many Ruby projects already implement publishing via GitHub Actions, but are still using the less secure method of authentication with an API token. Updating those to Trusted Publishing should require very small changes.

I’ve already removed all API tokens from our own theforeman account and converted workflows where needed.