Emergency hotfix release process — cherry-pick patch releases

[rajeshkamal5050]

Problem

Today we don't have an automated way to do a true emergency patch release. When a breaking change or critical bug ships, the next release includes everything merged to main — new features, refactors, etc. — increasing blast radius instead of limiting it.

The team wants the ability to cherry-pick specific commit(s) on top of an existing release tag and push a new patch release from it.

[rajeshkamal5050]

@danieljurek would love your thoughts on this — you know our release pipelines best. What would it take to support cherry-pick patch releases from a release branch instead of always cutting from main?

[danieljurek]

Our Hotfix Branching policy describes this process. The engsys today supports releasing from branches that aren't main

1. Find commit tagged for the release that needs a hotfix
2. Create a hotfix branch from that tag like hotfix/azd-1.30.1 incrementing the released version
3. Cherry-pick fixes into the hotfix branch
4. Update CHANGELOG and version.txt in the hotfix branch for release
5. Run release