Update to release management

[markdumay]

With the first major release of Hinode nearing, the release management process of Hinode is being streamlined. The next paragraphs capture the key elements of the revised approach. Where possible, these changes will be applied to the documentation and releases retrospectively.

Release notes

GitHub has the ability to automatically generate release notes. GitHub lists the merged Pull Requests (PRs) of a specific release and (optionally) groups them by label. It also gives credit to contributors and highlights first-time contributions.

To take full advantage of the generation of release notes, Hinode will focus on merging Pull Requests with a meaningful title from now on. So far, the codebase primarily used commit messages. Pull Requests would often refer to the branch name. Going forward, each PR will receive a label that is used to group them in the release notes. The PR title will summarize the change using active vocabulary.

The labels are used to put a PR in one of the following categories. The exact mapping of the labels to the categories is available in .github/release.yml.

Category	Description
❗ Breaking Changes	A change is introduced that is not backwards compatible. Usually, this would imply a new major version of Hinode is introduced too. See https://semver.org for more details.
🚀 Highlights	A change is considered to be a significant improvement or exciting new feature, worth mentioning separately.
🎉 New Features	A change is an improvement or new feature within the release. By definition, improvements should be backwards compatible.
🐛 Bug fixes	A change fixes an bug.
📦 Dependencies	A change updates a package dependency. Most dependencies will be automatically upgraded by Dependabot. Hinode merges these upgrades into the main branch automatically, unless one or more of the automated tests fail.
🧰 Other Changes	Any other change, such as a revision of the documentation. Hinode uses a separate repository for its documentation, which is why you should not expect many of these kind of updates in the main Hinode repository.

Version tracking

Inspired by Bootstrap, Hinode will use buttons and alerts to introduce a new feature or revision in its documentation. The shortcode Release was introduced in v0.14.1 to simplify the tracking of these changes in the documentation.

Release overview

A timeline with key releases since the initial launch has been added to https://gethinode.com/releases/. The timeline captures releases with a significant change. The data is manually curated for now and is derived from the release notes available on GitHub.