Refining the release/packaging process

[simonsan]

To take the burden off someone's shoulders, to run through the whole release process frequently, we should automate it as far as possible.

"Release early, and release often."

The goals could be:

• [ ] release more often
• [ ] release bug fixes and other immediate fixes more quickly

Tooling

Some tooling can help us to make releases less error-prone and more straight forward.

Release automation

• cargo-smart-release
• cargo-release
• release-plz
• cargo-dist

API checks

• cargo-public-api
• cargo-semver-checks

Changelogs

• git-cliff
• cocogitto

GH Actions

There are several GH actions, that can make building releases artefacts, creating release, and uploading artefacts easier.

• taiki-e/upload-rust-binary-action
• cargo-bins/release-pr
• taiki-e/create-gh-release-action
• obi1kenobi/cargo-semver-checks-action
• mgeisler/rust-release-gh-action

Workflows can be manually triggered

https://docs.github.com/en/actions/using-workflows/manually-running-a-workflow

GH Workflow Examples

• keepass-rs approach incl. semantic versioning
• automatic nightly releases
• cargo-binstall release workflow
• taiki-e/upload-rust-binary-action cross example
• gyroflow release workflow + scripts