Automate regular data releases

[halostatue]

The release process is relatively fast, but it should be automated as much as possible.

The release process looks like this:

1. Review any outstanding issues or pull requests to see if anything needs to be addressed. This is necessary because there is currently no automated source for extensions for the thousands of MIME entries. (Suggestions and/or pull requests for same would be deeply appreciated.)
2. bundle install
3. bundle exec rake mime:apache
4. bundle exec rake mime:iana
5. Review the changes to make sure that the changes are sane. The IANA data source changes from time to time, resulting in big changes or even a broken step 4. (The most recent change was the addition of the font/* top-level category.)
6. bundle exec rake convert
7. bundle exec rake update:version (This is new as of today.)
8. Write up the changes in History.md. If any PRs have been merged, these should be noted specifically.
9. Commit the changes and push to GitHub.
10. bundle exec rake release VERSION=newversion.

Some thoughts on this:

1. Any automation would have to go through a two stage process. The first stage would execute stages 3 and 4 because the JSON and column changes are noisier than the YAML changes. It would submit a pull request.
2. On approval/merge of an automation-generated pull request, the automation could execute steps 6–10, adding summary information to the History.md about the particular release.
3. A small change would have to be made suppressing Hoe.plugin :doofus for automation (but it should not be suppressed for human-based releases).

I think this needs to be done, but I have no time to implement such automation, nor am I running a server anywhere that could host it.

[halostatue]

This might be able to be done with GitHub actions.

[halostatue]

• Issue and PR review will always be manual.

• The following steps have been automated into a single rake task (rake release:automatic):

  • mime:apache
  • mime:iana convert
  • update:version
  • Write up the changes in History.md. (If any PRs have been merged, these should be noted specifically.)
  • Commit the changes and push to GitHub.

Still not sure how to push back to GitHub (I am sure there are actions that can do this), or to run this regularly (once a week?), or how to release to Rubygems. Once those are solved (more a problem of time or a PRs from interested parties), this can be fully automated.

I may modify the rake update:history task added to be able to detect and replace a NEXT / YYYY-MM-DD shape so that PRs can be merged with those updates and be released on the very next automatic release.