Devfile registry operator release automation

[michael-valdron]

/kind user-story

Which area this user story is related to?

/area registry
/area releng

User Story

As a maintainer of devfile services, I want to have release automation, so that the process of creating registry operator releases are efficient to execute.

To make it efficient for devfile service maintainer to perform, we should have a Makefile rule to execute the steps to start the release process on GitHub. This should allow a similar process as the release script for devfile/api: https://github.com/devfile/api/blob/b4fea572af1a98ca487495857add4007c35f5aea/make-release.sh

Acceptance Criteria

• Create new release Makefile rule
• Add process to make final release changes
  • Such as updating the release version number references and correcting missing alm-examples when running make bundle (kubernetes-sigs/kustomize#5042)
• Add process to checkout target release branch and commit release changes to that branch
• Add process to create PR to merge new release changes into remote target release branch
• Test the new rule on a forked repository
• Update usage documentation with this new rule

[michael-valdron]

No longer including the release automation in the initial release process, will instead revise documentation once this issue is completed.

[Jdubrick]

Moving to review as I will be opening a PR but marking it as do not merge. @michael-valdron will be working on a fix for the previous release to registry-operator where a squash merge occurred whereas we need the entire git history. Once that is done this issue should be good to mark as complete and merge.

[Jdubrick]

This issue is currently blocked as it requires changes to the git history of the release branches for registry operator. Currently there is squash commits in the release branches which conflict with the automation as the bot cannot handle merge conflicts without human intervention, which defeats the purpose of the automation. This is occurring because the releases are based off of main but in the release branches it has diverged from main in the git history with these squash commits. In order to prevent this from happening and to allow this issue to become unblocked the git history needs to be altered in the release branches so that it does not diverge from main.

release-v0: https://github.com/devfile/registry-operator/commits/release-v0/
main: https://github.com/devfile/registry-operator/commits/main/