Scripts to prepare releases

[jl-wynen]

Version placeholders

Due to CalVer, we need to use placeholders with versionadded and friends. In Scipp, we have tox targets to check for and replace RELEASE_PLACEHOLDER. But this does not work with the release notes which also contain a placeholder in the commented-out template that we don't want to replace.

• Find a way around the release-note template problem (see also below).
• Add tox targets to copier template.
• Use the check target in the release workflow
• Document how to use the prepare release target. (Shouldn't be done automatically because a human should check if it made a mess.)

Release notes

We need to manually remove empty sections in the release notes. I looked into writing a script to do that. But while docutils has a parser for rst, it doesn't have a writer. And similarly, if we switched to markdown files, myst-parser has a parser but also no writer. We could use a generic markdown parser but that might struggle with myst-extensions. Or we use a custom parser which could be complicated. Esp. for rst; markdown should be simpler.

Maybe splitting the release notes into separate documents, one per version, would simplify this. WE discussed this before but never implemented it.

[SimonHeybrock]

We are currently not writing release notes for any of the projects using copier_template, and have instead been relying on those on GitHub. Are you suggesting this should change?

[jl-wynen]

I don't remember what the precise reason for this was. But using release notes in the docs would still require extra work even with what I proposed here.