Define the Versioning Strategy

[Pokom]

While 0 is the new 1.0, we should have a well defined strategy on how we version and release cloudcost-exporter.

Define a release workflow in github actions.

[nikimanoledaki]

Out of curiosity, what is the current release process? Is it manually done through --> https://github.com/grafana/cloudcost-exporter/releases/new where a new tag is also created manually?

As for the cadence, it looks like it's weekly to bi-monthly. Could you share more on the reason for the patches, such as 0.4.x, versus new minor versions?

[Pokom]

@nikimanoledaki see https://github.com/grafana/cloudcost-exporter/blob/main/docs/contribute/releases.md for a very brief guide on the release process. For versioning, we try to stick with semver as best as we can, but it's always a judgement call. Fixes/dependencies end up being patches, whereas new features is a minor version update. Since we're still in alpha, we make no gaurantees of backwards compatibility so we've stuck with 0.x.x until we're ready .

As for the cadence, it looks like it's weekly to bi-monthly.

Cadence is so far as we need it, but mostly aligning with PR's merged in or dependency updates.

[nikimanoledaki]

Thank you, hadn't seen the release docs on this!

Happy to add a goreleaser workflow if you agree to this approach :) That way we can start hacking at it. We would still need to create new tags manually. The workflow would listen to new tags that are created. How does that sound?

[Pokom]

Great work @nikimanoledaki! From your perspective, is there anything else we should do on this issue? Or is having release notes automatically generated good enough for now?

[nikimanoledaki]

We can close this issue and revisit the release process with more specific changes we'd like to make.

Ad hoc releases are fine for now IMO rather than a cadence - we don't need to introduce unnecessary processes but that could change in the next months.

We could introduce some stylistic changes to the changelog if we want. For example, the Terraform provider doesn't use the goreleaser's changelog but rather uses GitHub's own release note generation features: https://github.com/grafana/terraform-provider-grafana/releases/tag/v3.16.0 I think what we have is good for now - we can change this later if we want!

[Pokom]

Closing with #359, and we can always iterate in the future. Thanks again @nikimanoledaki