Support release branches

[AZielinsky95]

We should be adding release/* branches to our workflow files
and using the branch name to map to a table name.

[jenncoop]

Some projects that rely on release branches are not able to use the tool atm, so seems worth moving this one up a bit.

[AZielinsky95]

Those projects can use the tool!

All that needs to be done is the workflow file needs to be specified to run on any release branch.

on:
  push:
    branches: [ release/* ]

[jenncoop]

Okay, wonderful! If there are multiple release branches at once, will all commits from each branch go into the single table?

[AZielinsky95]

Yes they will. The way around that currently, is to have multiple workflow files for each release branch that passes in a specific table name.

One of the things we can do if we think it's worth it, is to parse the last path component of the release branch and look for a corresponding table. So a "release/1.5" branch would look for a table called "Release 1.5" if it couldn't find a table it would default to writing to Unreleased Changes table. (current default if no table name is provided)

[jenncoop]

@ssawchenko Do you ever have multiple release branches in flight at once?

[ssawchenko]

@ssawchenko Do you ever have multiple release branches in flight at once?

@jenncoop I don't think we have this too often in practice, but in theory I could see a case where we have a release in the works but we need to apply a hotfix/patch to the current release.

ie.

• Current release is 5.1
• We are doing active dev on release/5.2
• Bug comes in and we need to create release/5.1.1

In this case we would have 2 release branches in flight at once, unless we treat patches/hotfixes differently. I'm not sure we've hashed out a naming scheme for patches yet, so it's possible simply adopting a patch/<number> naming scheme would solve this.

[jenncoop]

@AZielinsky95 IIRC, the Coda API doesn't allow us to create tables, so we'd need to manually add the table with the corresponding release name ahead of the release starting. Am I remembering that correctly?

[AZielinsky95]

Yeah that's correct