Spike: Investigate methods of preventing merge problems between main branch and release branches for registry operator releases

[michael-valdron]

/kind user-story

Which area this user story is related to?

/area registry
/area releng

User Story

As a release engineer I want to prevent release branch merge problems from happening, so that I can provide releases efficiently.

Currently, the devfile registry operator release process with the pending changes to automate the collection of release changes to be merged into the target release branch is susceptible to merge conflicts. This is due to the ability to squash commits either when merging into the release PR branch or when merging into the release branch from the release PR, e.g. devfile/registry-operator#63.

Additionally, if there is no merging back into the main branch, any rebase fixes will not be permanent thus causing continuous repeat once a single squash commit is introduced into the release branch.

We'll need to find a prevention measure to reduce the frequency of merge/rebase problems while preforming the release process.

Acceptance Criteria

• Investigate other open source projects to gather possible solutions to refine the release process of the devfile registry operator
• Define possible solutions to choose from
• Based on the chosen solution for fixing the release branch merge problems, workout solution for back porting changes to prior major version release branches
• Create new issue(s) based on chosen solutions

[Jdubrick]

Issue created to track all of the required changes can be found here: #1518