Parachains runtime release process

[muharem]

The document is Work In Process and can be altered.

Problem

Parachains runtime release takes up to 2 weeks to prepare and publish.

Context

Parachains runtime release is semi-automated and takes up to 2 weeks to prepare and publish. Most of this time are manual checks, fixes, backports, weight calculation reruns. The target release cadence is one release every third week (same as relay chains / polkadot repo) which brings a manpower intensive release process.

In this document we will gather all related issues, and use the document as a reference for the problem.

Goals

• parachains runtime release takes up to 3 days;
• issue-free release builds;
• well defined and transparent release process:
  • every step is documented;
  • the progress (ex. release branch creation) can be followed by team members (ex. message notifications in matrix);

Known issues

• Release branch creation  #1687
• Runtime storage migrations checks from the release checklist #1659
• XCM configs review within release process #1682
• Automation of transaction_version bump #1686
• https://github.com/paritytech/ci_cd/issues/499
• weight generation and review process - issue/TBD @muharem
• Runtime Engineers support for Parachain Runtimes release #1761

Release steps completion notifications

To allow all interested parties at any time to check the current release status, we want to notify via a message to a dedicated Element room about every release steps completion.

Notifications:

• runtime spec_versions bump PR created (when automated)
• runtime transaction_version bump PR created (when automated)
• release branch created
• weights generated (link to the PR)
• integration tests completed
• release candidate built
• release published

[gilescope]

The transaction_version check is semi-automated and a newer version of that check is being worked on by @chevdor (this is the metadata differ that only needs the runtimes as inputs).

[chevdor]

Yes, I am actually working on an option that may even allow handling the transaction_version topic in a fully automated way.