chore: implement covector publish

[jbolda]

What kind of change does this PR introduce? (check at least one)

• Bugfix
• Feature
• New Binding Issue #___
• Code style update
• Refactor
• Build-related changes
• Other, please describe:

Does this PR introduce a breaking change? (check one)

• Yes. Issue #___
• No

The PR fulfills these requirements:

• It's submitted to the dev branch and not the latest branch
• When resolving a specific issue, it's referenced in the PR's title (e.g. fix: #xxx[,#xxx], where "xxx" is the issue number)
• A change file is added if any packages will require a version bump due to this PR per the instructions in the readme.

If adding a new feature, the PR's description includes:

• A convincing reason for adding this feature (to avoid wasting your time, it's best to open a suggestion issue first and wait for approval before working on it)

Other information:
This implements publishing through covector and removes the bulk of the Github Actions handling publishing. With this, we can also remove the latest branch.

[jbolda]

Adding a package.json at the root partly for devDeps and partly for better support of update bots such as renovate: renovatebot/renovate#4724

[jbolda]

Outputs from actions can only be strings, hence that jq jazz. I think if we can move the tangle release to a package or a cli command, we may be able to remove all of that. (I think it may also end up running the second job on every merge, but not a great way to avoid it other than shifting tangle I believe.) @rajivshah3 do you have any thoughts on that?

[rajivshah3]

Hmm, yeah the jq stuff isn't ideal. @obany do you think we can make a standalone NPM package for the Tangle Release and then just have the GH action be a wrapper around that?

[obany]

Hmm, yeah the jq stuff isn't ideal. @obany do you think we can make a standalone NPM package for the Tangle Release and then just have the GH action be a wrapper around that?

@rajivshah3 So a lib that can be referenced by the current GH Action and with a CLI as well ?

[jbolda]

@obany yea, something like that. That is how covector is setup. Mostly because it is rather complicated/fragile to get these actions setup and it helps being able to run something locally. Also the only way to "dynamically loop" through something is to spin up multiple machines which only increases the complexity (and run time).

[obany]

Just released v0.7.0 of the action (which actually behaves the same as the old one from a GHA perspective)

But the core is completely rewritten in TypeScript and refactored so that it can also be executed as a CLI from it's npm package.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/@iota/gh-tangle-release (CLI instructions at bottom of README)