[Bug]: [Beam Release Automation] Cut release branch workflow doesn't correctly kick off snapshot

[lostluck]

What happened?

The Cut release branch workflow is described as kicking off the new snapshot build, but actually doesn't successfully do so. https://beam.apache.org/contribute/release-guide/#use-cut_release_branch-workflow-to-cut-a-release-branch

The PR to the release branch is written, but the "Run Gradle Publish" comment is happening in the description field, so automation is not triggered.

https://github.com/apache/beam/pull/28572 (See for the release-2.51.0 edition).

I think if the comment were to be automatically done separately (instead of as part of the pr creation), this would be resolved.

cc: @kennknowles @damccorm

https://github.com/apache/beam/blob/master/.github/workflows/cut_release_branch.yml#L180

Aside: We should migrate that script to use gh instead of hub since it's built into action runners. Avoids installing the hub tool, and they serve similar purposes eg. https://github.com/apache/beam/blob/master/.github/workflows/build_release_candidate.yml#L298

Issue Priority

Priority: 2 (default / most bugs should be filed as P2)

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[kennknowles]

Acknowledged. Sounds like a bandaid won't be too hard, potentially. Might be more robust to have something that just kicked off a SNAPSHOT based on the presence of a new branch (maybe filtered to release-* since web edits create ugly branches on the main repo) or generally made it an independent workflow (with some automatic orchestrating workflow of course so we don't introduce extra manual steps)

[kennknowles]

As someone who just came to release, it was confusing that "Cut Release Branch" did more than cut the release branch. Obviously the docs are fine to clarify but it somehow seems wonky still.

[kennknowles]

I thought this might be 5 minutes but my 5 minute timebox of capturing the output of hub to get the PR number and then comment on it has expired. I assume this can be done with GHA pretty easily but I'll release this issue for now.