Automate releases and reduce bus-factor

[mpkorstanje]

🤔 What's the problem you're trying to solve?

From what I can tell the Cucumber Eclipse plugin is published in two manners:

1. The Eclipse Market Place entry, manually updated by @girijant. It has been updated quite recently, but the previous update appears to be from around 2017.

2. The update site is automatically updated on a push to main and always uses the latest from main. There have been no tagged stable releases since 2021.

3. There are no branch protections in place. This makes deleting main, or deleting the update site quite trivial.

So we currently have bus-factor of 1 on the Eclipse market place entry and no stable releases for users to fall back on.

✨ What's your proposed solution?

I've already put branch protections in place for main and gh-pages. So the solution comes in two parts:

a. Either transfer the Eclipse Marketplace entry from @girijant to Cucumber, or create a new user for Cucumber and publish the plugin using that. The credentials for the Cucumber user would be kept in keybase so the whole core team has access.

b. Adopt a release strategy. In short:

• All notable changes go into the CHANGELOG.md file.
• All pushes to main are published to the update site for snapshots.
• When making a release the change log rolls over and a new release/<x.y.z> branch is created and the release commit tagged. This branch is then used publish plugins to to the stable update site and make a release on Github. (Sounds complicated but with polyglot-release that is all reduced to 1-CLI command and some Github Actions).
• Automatically update the Eclipse Market place entry on stable releases (if possible).

⛏ Have you considered any alternatives or workarounds?

No response

📚 Any additional context?

• I wanted to look deeper into I am not able to install plugins from market place as this URL is not accessible. #529 but found that @girijant publishes this plugin from his personal account.

• The instructions in the read me are incorrect:

  You can install the latest release using the follwoing update site in Eclipse:

  https://cucumber.github.io/cucumber-eclipse/update-site

  For users who wants to keep up-to-date with the latest development version please use

  https://cucumber.github.io/cucumber-eclipse/update-site/main

  On the first url this project publishes the snapshots from main, the second does not exist.

[laeubi]

From what I can tell the Cucumber Eclipse plugin is published in two manners:
The Eclipse Market Place entry, manually updated by @girijant. It has been updated quite recently, but the previous update appears to be from around 2017

The marketplace entry is for the marketplace, but only points to an updatesite where one can install items from, so it is not a dedicated deployment.

The update site is automatically updated on a push to main and always uses the latest from main. There have been no tagged stable releases since 2021

We have

• https://github.com/cucumber/cucumber-eclipse/tree/v2.x
• https://github.com/cucumber/cucumber-eclipse/tree/v1.x
• https://github.com/cucumber/cucumber-eclipse/tree/v0.x

if anyone would work on these branches they where pushed as well to the corresponding updatesite but it has not really happened that anyone cared much about updating old versions.

I've already put branch protections in place for main and gh-pages.

The second one will likely break the current deployment path as I don't see any adjustments to the actions that would allow the automation to push changes there?

So the solution comes in two parts

I think one can always improve, but I really don't want to complicate things to much, in fact contributions to this repository are really low (last one was two years ago fixing a typo) and therefore the goal always was to make it easy and lightweight to make the efforts low, so I wonder who will dedicate to drive such enhanced process that as a first glance seem not to bring much benefit over the current process.

The instructions in the read me are incorrect

Please don't be confused by the fact that an eclipse-update site is usually not something you can access with a browser so its best accessed using github so we start here https://github.com/cucumber/cucumber-eclipse/tree/gh-pages/update-site and you see there is a sub-folder for each branch:

and an index.html that shows some content if users browse the url directly.

There you can see that the "stable" site only aggregates all previous releases (up to 2.x)

cucumber-eclipse/update-site/compositeContent.xml

Lines 5 to 9 in c269f5d

	<children size='3'>
	<child location='v0.x'/>
	<child location='v1.x'/>
	<child location='v2.x'/>
	</children>

and the main contains the current snapshot/development site

so the information in the readme is correct and if you add this URL into the "Install new Software" dialog you will see

while with the other site you will see

[mpkorstanje]

Cheers! I'll have to study that for a minute.

The second one will likely break the current deployment path as I don't see any adjustments to the actions that would allow the automation to push changes there?

Branch protection at the bare minimum only prevents deletion and force pushes that would result in deletions. I've disabled it for the gh-pages branch for now and I'll have to come back to it when I have a bit more time.

[laeubi]

Cheers! I'll have to study that for a minute.

The second one will likely break the current deployment path as I don't see any adjustments to the actions that would allow the automation to push changes there?

Branch protection at the bare minimum only prevents deletion and force pushes that would result in deletions. I've disabled it for the gh-pages branch for now and I'll have to come back to it when I have a bit more time.

Alright that sounds safe... I was just not sure because one rule could be to not directly push to a branch but always use a PR.

[laeubi]

I have now enhanced the html display a bit (maybe needs a refresh in the browser!):

• https://cucumber.github.io/cucumber-eclipse/update-site/
• https://cucumber.github.io/cucumber-eclipse/update-site/main/

I noticed we even have a webpage here:

• https://cucumber.github.io/cucumber-eclipse/

but it is also a bit bare, so if anyone likes to improve that, contributions would be welcome!
For now I removed the news (as it was not maintained anyways for a long time) and the navigation (as it only contains a link to the page itself).

[mpkorstanje]

Oh that looks much better, way less confusing. Cheers! 😄

[mpkorstanje]

One thing left to do, checkout the branch protections for gh-pages. But I'll cover that later.