Summary of an approximate procedure to cut a release for a jupyterhub project

[consideRatio]

UPDATE

Reference https://jupyterhub-team-compass.readthedocs.io/en/latest/practices/releases.html for details about this going onwards.

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Just wanted to document briefly an approximate procedure I find myself following when making a release for some project in our organization.

• git checkout main -> git pull
• github-activity --heading-level=3
  • PR labelling: I read the output of github-activity and look for PRs under the uncategorized heading that didn't have a label for github-activity to sort it by. If I find non-bot PRs there I visit them and add a relevant label. github-activity can't sort ci labels automatically to go under a ### Continuous integration improvements heading but I handle those manually.
  • PR title updates: I read the output of github-activity and look for PRs with a title that can be improved and updates the title of the PR on GitHub. For example in jupyterhub/oauthenticator I think its relevant that all PRs associated with a specific authenticator leads with that in the title, such as [GitHub] Fix ....
• github-activity --heading-level=3 (again)
• Copy and paste the output into from github-activity to the changelog and refine it manually:
  • Decide a version increment.
    • Bump major version if a breaking change is introduced.
      • If a major version bump is made, also write some summary manually before listing all the PRs.
    • Bump minor version if an enhancement or new feature is added
    • Bump patch version if only documentation and bugfixes etc are provided.
  • Add a date to the release that seems likely to match when it can get merged
  • Remove various pre-commit PRs and dependabot PRs that just bumps CI stuff.
  • Remove various @welcome, @dependabot, and other bots from contributors lists etc
  • Put ci labelled PRs manually under ### Continuous integration improvements heading
• Make a commit named like Add changelog for 1.2.3 and open a PR with it titled the same
• Await merge, and when its merged follow the instructions described in RELEASE.md

[choldgraf]

This is great - could we encode it in the team compass somehow as a checklist that could be pasted into an issue?

[consideRatio]

I've updated the original issue description to link to https://jupyterhub-team-compass.readthedocs.io/en/latest/practices/releases.html going onwards, which should be fine once we get #679 through.

Closing this pre-emptively, its anyhow just a "info" issue rather than something we should take action on.