Release process current state and possible update

[OrlinVasilev]

Hi Community!
Based on our community meeting there is a question about release management and how we can improve if we want to improve!

please share your thoughts on what is working well and what needs improvement!

Orlix

[mateusoliveira43]

Hi everyone

My idea would be to remove the need of adding a changelog during PRs using Latest Changes tool. With it, after each PR, CI would commit the changelog info of that PR, already in desired format (using a template), removing the need of make changelog.

Examples of usage

• https://github.com/mateusoliveira43/cly/commits/main
• https://github.com/tiangolo/fastapi/commits/master

Pros

• no need to manually write changelogs during PRs
• every PR would have a changelog
  • in my opinion, this is good because even small PRs would be referenced in Velero releases (for example, I think I already have 2 PRs merged, but both without changelog, so my name will not appear in future releases. I think this is good to attract more contributors). But we could also just trigger it using the label used today, for example

Cons

• every PR merged will result in a second commit to the target branch (@sseago)
  • the best scenario would be prior to merge, add the changelog to the commit, but I believe this is still not possible in GitHub actions today https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/configuring-branches-and-merges-in-your-repository/configuring-pull-request-merges/managing-a-merge-queue

Related issues

• Document when to add a changelog, and when to not #3589
• document & automate plugin repo release processes #2522

@mpryc please also share your idea

[draghuram]

I don't have any new suggestions but it would be good to document release procedure in "Contribute" section. In particular, guidelines to back-porting changes in both main repo as well as plug-ins should be documented.

[OrlinVasilev]

it's available in the docs have seen this? https://velero.io/docs/main/release-instructions/

[draghuram]

Thanks. I checked it now and it does contain many details. But it doesn't seem to have the procedure for back-porting changes to released versions.