Automatic beta release

[Kwankyu Lee]

Hi,

It is painful to wait for the next beta, especially when PRs fixing ci are in queue.

It would be nice if a beta release is made automatically every week.

Since a github workflow may run like a cronjob, this seems doable.

Let's call it "beta (release) manager".

Some ideas for the beta manager.

1. The beta manager runs only if the previous release was also a beta.

2. The beta manager keeps a special branch "beta_branch" that is always based on "develop" branch.

2. At the end of the week, the beta manager merges "beta_branch" to "develop" branch, and make a beta release.

3. During the week, the human release manager keeps adding PR branches to "beta_branch"

The beta release manager may do some smart things to keep the beta release as stable as possible.

The beta release manager is basically a helper to our human release manager. He should keep the button to switch on and off the beta bot.

As I don't know the precise workflow and concerns of the release manager, this idea may be unrealistic.

What do you think?

[Michael Orlitzky]

On Fri, 2024-08-30 at 20:26 -0700, Kwankyu Lee wrote:
>
> What do you think?


Why not do what everyone else does, and let developers merge PRs into
the "develop" branch when they're approved? Waiting only causes merge
conflicts. The release manager could still cherry-pick commits for
betas, release candidates, and actual releases. But having a release
process for the git repo is a quirk of an old development model that
doesn't make sense any more.

[Kwankyu Lee]

On Saturday, August 31, 2024 at 9:58:01 PM UTC+9 Michael Orlitzky wrote:

Why not do what everyone else does, and let developers merge PRs into
the "develop" branch when they're approved? Waiting only causes merge
conflicts. 

As a middle gound, we may let the beta manager bot collect (merge to beta_branch) positively reviewed PRs  during the week. We may call the special branch betabot instead of beta_branch in this csae.