Use GitHub's CLI gh to publish releases

[ivanvc]

What would you like to be added?

In an effort to improve automation in the release process, I want to open the discussion of automating step 7 from the release guide. In my experience by participating in the release process, this is one of the most involved steps.

I think we could automate it by using gh release create. We could start by drafting a new release, eliminating the step of copying and manually editing the release text, and uploading the resulting artifacts. Then, we could keep a manual step of publishing the release while verifying that the draft looks correct.

Why is this needed?

Work towards improving the release process. Although I would like to have way more automation, I feel it's a good compromise to start by taking small steps toward full automation.

[ivanvc]

cc. @jmhbnz @ahrtr @serathius. Please let me know your thoughts.

[serathius]

#13980 as reference for previous work in this area.

[ahrtr]

Thanks for the proposal and sounds good to me. Do you have a PoC PR?

[ivanvc]

#13980 as reference for previous work in this area.

@serathius, I love the idea of having it automated after we push a tag (as I think we also discussed during one release). But I also see that as far-fetched and still needs some more investigation. As we're now part of the Kubernetes organization, there are some challenges that we've been seeing with automated jobs that need to publish stuff to GitHub.
That all to say that I'm aligned with your thinking :)

Thanks for the proposal and sounds good to me. Do you have a PoC PR?

@ahrtr, not yet. I wanted to hear your opinions before implementing it.

[jmhbnz]

Thanks for creating the feature issue @ivanvc. I am completely supportive.

In future we will move away from manually running scripts to having prow jobs (as GitHub Actions token permissions are too restrictive under k8s enterprise org).

In the short term further automation for the manual steps we currently perform is a great idea and will help the transition to prow jobs long term.

[ivanvc]

/assign

As we're all aligned, I'll go ahead and draft a PoC PR.