Bring our release practices in line with rest of JupyterHub org

[yuvipanda]

JupyterHub now has a very well thought out release system (https://github.com/jupyterhub/jupyterhub/blob/main/RELEASE.md). repo2docker has some documentation, but it's a bit out of date. We should update our docs to match rest of JupyterHub.

[consideRatio]

I looked at this to figure out details on the action points:

• [x] release automation in place
• [x] release automation rely on versioneer instead of tbump, its ok I think
• [x] changelog maintained (in markdown, using github-activity)
• [ ] release docs doesn't mention the changelog (copy/paste/adapt from systemdspawner/RELEASE.md pending https://github.com/jupyterhub/jupyterhub-python-repo-template/pull/21)
• [ ] release docs doesn't mention the conda-forge feedstock (copy/paste/adapt from jupyterhub-python-repo-template/RELEASE.md)
• [ ] release docs doesn't mention anything else like refreezing environments - should we do this before release and if so, linking to what docs on doing that?
• [ ] readme doesn't include badges for pypi, conda-forge, code coverage, issue tracking, help forum (copy/paste/adapt from jupyterhub-python-repo-template readme)

Input needed about...

release docs doesn't mention anything else like refreezing environments - should we do this before release and if so, linking to what docs on doing that?

[manics]

I don't think refreezing environments should be part of the release process:

• it increases the workload on the person managing the release
• ideally we also want to test the refrozen environments by deploying to mybinder.org

I think it's fine to mention it as something to consider when planning a release though.

[consideRatio]

ideally we also want to test the refrozen environments by deploying to mybinder.org

Are we using repo2docker main there?

[manics]

Yes, e.g. https://github.com/jupyterhub/mybinder.org-deploy/pull/2643

That's why we need versioneer (or some other auto versioning tool)- so we can have the git sha as part of the version for repo2docker installed from main, and for the container image built from main.

[minrk]

Agree that freezing should not be part of making a release, but is a good thing to highlight early in preparation for a release. Generally releases should be relatively long after freezes.