Releasing process updates

[codebien]

What?

• It updates the release process introducing the release branches.
• It creates a dedicated template to release patch versions.

Why?

• It doesn't freeze the master branch when the k6 repo is on feature freeze.
• Patches and minor releases have the same process by tagging from a release branch. (Instead, now we tag from master for minor releases and from a hotfix branch for patches).

Related PR(s)/Issue(s)

[joanlopez]

Strictly speaking, that's outside the scope of this PR but... what's the plan for docs?
Have a folder per minor? Like: v1.0.x, v1.1.x, etc?

[oleiade]

Good question 👀 @heitortsergent do you maybe have insights on how you folks handle that in other projects?

[heitortsergent]

I don't have insights into how other projects handle minor versions, and we also handle versions differently than them (folders vs branches).

@jdbaldry would you have any insight here? Is it just a matter of renaming/creating folders for minor versions?

[jdbaldry]

I'm not sure I understand, sorry. Are you not already maintaining a directory of documentation per minor version of k6?

[heitortsergent]

Oh yes, I misread it too, I'm sorry. I thought this was in case we had to release a patch version.

For other projects, they would just have a branch for each minor version, which is the equivalent of our folders in k6-docs. Is that right @jdbaldry?

[jdbaldry]

Yeah, most repositories have long-lived version branches for future patching and such, where the docs are maintained alongside the code. Since grafana/k6-docs is a docs-only repository, it's simpler to just have directories in the main branch instead.

[oleiade]

Besides minor comments 🚀

[olegbespalov]

I generally don't oppose the proposal; we could try it. We might make our checklist statements closer to http://releaseflow.org, which is my understanding of our end goal.

The concrete example:
The current version says cherry-pick changes and it sounds (maybe to me) like the only possible way to go, whenever in release flow it more freedom version ensure this fix is applied (usually cherry-picked) to other branches where necessary

[codebien]

Hey reviewers, please take another look 🙏