[Workflow] Automatic version releases

[yuanming-hu]

Concisely describe the proposed feature

The current version release workflow is mostly manual. It would be great to make it more automatic.

Describe the solution you'd like (if any)

I briefly investigated the ways to do the workflow more automatically. The key is to make use of the RESTful GitHub API. For example,

• Creating pull requests: https://docs.github.com/en/rest/reference/pulls#create-a-pull-request
• Creating releases: https://docs.github.com/en/rest/reference/repos#releases

First step

Maybe the initial step is to implement a CLI system that creates a release PR automatically.
Based on https://github.com/taichi-dev/taichi/blob/master/misc/format_server.py, we can perhaps we can create a "release server" that triggers releases twice a week.

Additional comments

Note that git request-pull is unrelated to opening a PR on GitHub: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34945947/git-request-pull-how-to-create-a-github-pull-request-on-the-command-line

More investigation is needed to automatically trigger the CUDA build bot.

[archibate]

The key is to make use of the RESTful GitHub API.

That would be helpful when releasing from CLI.
Alternative solution is to release via the official GitHub Action https://github.com/actions/create-release.

Would you mind provide more information about how PyPI packages currently? It's heard that you have a PyPI automation rule that detects GitHub release?

[yuanming-hu]

Alternative solution is to release via the official GitHub Action https://github.com/actions/create-release.

Oh, that one looks nice! Is there a way to trigger it after the release PR is merged? (Something like post-commit action?)

Would you mind provide more information about how PyPI packages currently? It's heard that you have a PyPI automation rule that detects GitHub release?

So basically every buildbot will try to upload. However, only the post-commit build bot has access to the PyPI password, so the pre-commit build will automatically fail to upload.

The other fact is that PyPI will just keep the first upload of a version, that's why only the release PR commit gets uploaded and later post-commit builds will fail to upload.