Script to automate release notes

[cwickham]

Adds a script to automate the steps of adding release notes for the old release.

Closes quarto-dev/quarto-cli#10277

In addition, we'd need to change this step in the release checklist:

https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli/blob/a2026c8b7c775665472b73f30b84d8da7a94c178/dev-docs/checklist-make-a-new-quarto-release.md?plain=1#L24

to:

  - run `quarto run tools/release-notes.R`

[cwickham]

@cderv Could you take a look at this and see what you think?

I plan to have the version numbers be provided as command line inputs. I couldn't think of a better way than taking three inputs old_release, new_release_major, and new_prerelease_major, so I'm open to ideas.

[cderv]

That looks good !

Few ideas that I am throwing here:

• We can create listing content through a YAML file: https://quarto.org/docs/websites/website-listings.html#yaml-listing-content. This means that for Add new item to download-older listing in docs/download/index.qmd we could managing the file programmatically through your script to add a version. Maybe no manual step would be needed in that case.

• Regarding arguments, I believe we have ways to retrieve version information.

  • We can fetch information for Github latest release, or even our own API https://quarto.org/docs/download/_download.json or https://quarto.org/docs/download/_prerelease.json
  • From there you can know / compute old, new one and next one.

I believe with this, you can have a full automated script for this update. Only manual step would be to check git diff and commit.

What do you think ?

[cwickham]

@cderv Ah yeah, the listing idea is good! I'll implement that. Actually, docs/download/_download-older.yml exists, we just weren't using it!

If we wait until after _download.json and _prerelease.json are generated to run this script (which we do according to the checklist), I can use them for the new release version, and new prerelease version. I might need to look into their history to get the old release version.

[cwickham]

@cderv OK, I think I've fully automated now. Do you want to take another look?

[github-actions]

Successfully created backport PR for prerelease:

• [Sync to prerelease] Script to automate release notes #1410