Release process - Announcement and documentation

[fjetter]

Over the past couple of weeks we had a few failed attempts to release, see #245

While the issue is not very long and it is OK to read ~10-15 comments, it is not absolutely clear what the current state is, what decisions have been made, what's blocking a release, who takes care of resolving the release blockers, who will be the release manager, etc.

I would like to propose that we structure the release announcements a bit better and keep the top-level comment up to date with the most recent information, e.g.

---

Example for a release on-time

Release number	2022.05.01
Planned release date	2022-05-12
Status	On-track
Release manager

Best effort

• A ticket we try to close before the release but it will not block the release

Blocker

• Already known ticket that would cause us to block and postpone the release if not fixed by then

---

With blocker

Release number	2022.05.01
Planned release date	2022-05-26
Status	Blocked
Release manager

Blockers

We should assign someone to blockers to have a person responsible for it

• Don't expose insecure HTTP API distributed#6407
• Remove report and safe from Worker.close distributed#6363 (review) (This should be a new, open ticket)

---

We can open these kind of templates early on and update the tickets with up-to-date information along the way. If potential blockers for a release come up during development, we can track this here already. This could help us with the many "last-minute" cancellations.

Thoughts?

[jakirkham]

Generally seems reasonable

If we are going to go with this template (or other similar template), would suggest we add it to the GitHub issue templates of this repo to ease creation

Would be curious to here @jrbourbeau's thoughts here 🙂

Edit: Should add personally just ran into a situation where this high level communication would have helped

[jrbourbeau]

Thanks for raising this issue @fjetter. This seems like a reasonable thing to try to me. Judging from the number of 👍 on your original post, it seems that others agree too

If we are going to go with this template (or other similar template), would suggest we add it to the GitHub issue templates of this repo to ease creation

I was thinking the same thing -- I'll push up a PR to add a template

[jrbourbeau]

See #248 for adding a release template