GHA-283 Make new-version optional by default

[alex-meseldzija-sonarsource]

Part of

[hashicorp-vault-sonar-prod]

GHA-283

[sonar-review-alpha]

Summary

This PR makes the new-version input optional in the automated-release workflow (previously required). When new-version is not provided, the workflow will presumably use an alternative version-determination mechanism.

The PR also improves the notify-slack action to accept Slack channel IDs (e.g., C1234ABCDE, D…, G…) in addition to channel names. The regex validation ensures only valid Slack IDs are preserved as-is, while channel names are still prefixed with # as needed.

What reviewers should know

Start with: .github/workflows/automated-release.yml — the core change is one-line (required: true → required: false). Check if there are any workflow steps that handle the case when new-version is not provided.

Watch for: The incomplete author description ("Part of ") suggests this might be part of a larger effort. Verify this change doesn't break existing callers that rely on the validation, and check if the workflow has a fallback mechanism when the version isn't manually specified.

notify-slack changes: The channel ID support is a pure enhancement. The regex ^[CDG][A-Z0-9]{8,10}$ follows Slack's actual ID format. Tests cover the boundary cases (8, 9, 10 suffix chars). Documentation was updated to reflect the new capability.

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[sonarqubecloud]

Quality Gate passed

Issues
0 New issues
0 Accepted issues
0 New dependency risks

Measures
0 Security Hotspots
0.0% Coverage on New Code
0.0% Duplication on New Code

See analysis details on SonarQube Cloud

[sonar-review-alpha]

The change is safe and intentional. When new-version is omitted, it flows as an empty string into create-jira-version's jira-new-version-name input, which already handles the empty case by auto-incrementing the minor version (see create-jira-version/action.yml lines 53–78). The summary step at line 542 already has the || 'not specified, autoincrement minor version' fallback, confirming this behavior was pre-planned.

One thing worth a quick confirmation: cloud-security-automated-release.yml (line 71–72) and abd-automated-release.yml (line 70–72) both still declare new-version as required: true. If the intent of the larger effort is to make auto-increment the default across all release workflows, those two will need the same update. If they're intentionally excluded for now that's fine, but it's worth noting the inconsistency so callers aren't surprised.

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[nils-werner-sonarsource]

LGTM!