More automated release process

[ogoffart]

The release process right now is fairly automated. But @hunger complained that there are still too many manual step. This issue document some of these manual step and consider things to automate.

By "release script", i mean the github action that do the release, which is right now, the nightly build with the release checked.

This basicly take some steps from https://github.com/slint-ui/wiki/blob/main/infrastructure/release_checklist.md

• [x] Adjusting the ChangeLog: Should the CI action add the ## [$VERSION] - $DATE and the tag at the end. (I think this ought to be a manual step)
• [ ] Version Update in readme and docs (We maybe shouldn't need to do that anymore if the readme reference an old version, that's ok) otherwise, the version update script could take care of that, after the previous release. But we don't want the readme to point to a version that don't exist yet.
• [ ] Change the URL in slint-docs-preview.html to include the version number. This should make a commit before the crates.io upload and push that.
• [ ] Make the Cargo.lock: We could decide to keep the Cargo.lock always, or make it part of the commit from the previous step
• [x] Run the "Create release directory" action in the website repo: instead of coppying snapshots/master to release/x.y.z, we could create the artifact directly in release/x.y.z. And the other steps that this action is doing could also be done by this action
• [ ] Publish to crates.io using the ./scripts/publish.sh , and then to npm. The problem is that this often tends to fail and it might easier if run in local.
• [ ] Adjusting the value for the release tag: We could detect the release version and fill the value there. (including the proper changelog link? But I'm afraid that the blog post URL, if any, might still need manual editing. https://github.com/slint-ui/slint/blob/bcca47615b3104f04521581232e948b9595275ff/.github/workflows/nightly_snapshot.yaml#L373-L375
• [ ] Update the release/x and release/x.y branches
• [ ] change back the url in slint-docs-preview.html to the snapshot one (revert the release commit)
• [ ] Update versions numbers to the next version

[hunger]

Maybe we can look into existing tooling and how that can help us: There is cargo-release and similar tools meant to automate much of the release process of Rust projects. This includes the upload of sets of crates in dependency order as well as bumping versions on the rust side of the project.

We could have an xtask to do ensure the version number in Cargo.toml is propagated to the non-Rust parts of the project as well.

The website refresh action can surely be triggered by the release action.

[ogoffart]

The website refresh action can surely be triggered by the release action.

I'd prefer removing it completely by putting it in the same workflow

[ogoffart]

The current proccess is fine as it is, the remaining task are difficult to automate for very low gain.