ci: Integrate Release-please action and config

[JesperDramsch]

This is a proposal to manage our release process and changelog updates using release-please). This was originally proposed by @dnerini.

From the docs:

Release Please automates CHANGELOG generation, the creation of GitHub releases, and version bumps for your projects.

It does so by parsing your git history, looking for Conventional Commit messages, and creating release PRs.

It does not handle publication to package managers or handle complex branch management.

Analysis of Alternatives

I have evaluated alternatives such as Python Semantic Releases and a few others, but release-please seems like the most mature project that would work across all packages, including mono-repos and helps with the changelog as well.

It is to be said, that the documentation of release-please is not very beginner-friendly, so it will probably take a few tries to set up correctly until we have a working setup usable across all of Anemoi.

For reference, there is a archived repo showing the setup for mono-repos if that is necessary

How to run

They have implemented a corresponding Action.

Additional Information

I have mainly used the Manifest Releaser document to set up the configs and action.
Additionally, I looked at the JSON schema to evaluate if there are additional relevant config entries.

Caveat

All automated log generators require some sort of commit convention.

Since we squash-merge anyways, we can limit the effect on new contributors by only requiring PRs to follow Conventional Commits. This seems like an acceptable half-way solution that doesn't get in the way of quick development, but introduces some structure in the code itself.

[codecov-commenter]

Codecov Report

All modified and coverable lines are covered by tests ✅

Project coverage is 71.86%. Comparing base (2837ecd) to head (8b6f103).
Report is 10 commits behind head on develop.

Additional details and impacted files

@@           Coverage Diff            @@
##           develop      #67   +/-   ##
========================================
  Coverage    71.86%   71.86%           
========================================
  Files            7        7           
  Lines          263      263           
========================================
  Hits           189      189           
  Misses          74       74           

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[dnerini]

@OpheliaMiralles @icedoom888 @frazane please take this opportunity to have a closer look at release-please and feel free to leave your feedback. The idea would be to roll out this to all anemoi repos.

[dnerini]

@JesperDramsch squash commits seems to be right way to go with release-please (see here). This would limit the need to follow conventional commit messages to PR titles only.

[b8raoult]

Double // comments are not valid in JSON. I guess the . release-please-config.json file is merely a template.

[JesperDramsch]

Double // comments are not valid in JSON. I guess the . release-please-config.json file is merely a template.

Oh. Thanks for catching this!

[JesperDramsch]

@JesperDramsch squash commits seems to be right way to go with release-please (see here). This would limit the need to follow conventional commit messages to PR titles only.

Ah fantastic @dnerini. I'm glad this resonates, I hope the action I added to check these will help with this.

[frazane]

Seems like a great idea, thank you! Question: now that we're in major version zero (early development) will breaking changes by default result in a minor version bump?

[JesperDramsch]

Seems like a great idea, thank you! Question: now that we're in major version zero (early development) will breaking changes by default result in a minor version bump?

Yes exactly. So currently I have configured it so that breaking changes bump minor and features bump patch.