Populate release as part of the Step 1: Prep Release workflow?

[jtpio]

Problem

Running the Step 1: Prep Release is a good way to check the version is correctly bumped, and the changelog correctly created.

However this workflow does not populate the draft GitHub release with the built artifacts (wheel, sdist, npm tarballs), as this is done as part of the populate-release step in the Step 2: Publish Release workflow.

Maintainers might sometimes want to make sure the built assets are correct, and perform some manual checks.

Proposed Solution

This likely does not require any change to the releaser core functionality. Maybe just moving this step:

jupyter_releaser/example-workflows/publish-release.yml

Lines 25 to 32 in 8568b9b

	- name: Populate Release
	id: populate-release
	uses: jupyter-server/jupyter_releaser/.github/actions/populate-release@v2
	with:
	token: ${{ secrets.ADMIN_GITHUB_TOKEN }}
	branch: ${{ github.event.inputs.branch }}
	release_url: ${{ github.event.inputs.release_url }}
	steps_to_skip: ${{ github.event.inputs.steps_to_skip }}

To this workflow: https://github.com/jupyter-server/jupyter_releaser/blob/main/example-workflows/prep-release.yml

I guess one could try that on a test repo first to see if the whole flow would still work fine.

Additional context

cc @martinRenou who I think was mentioning this after using the python_packages configuration of the releaser for https://github.com/voila-dashboards/voici

[blink1073]

Yeah, that should work, without any changes to core.

[jtpio]

Maybe one drawback of this approach if that the release commit is pushed during the populate-release step.

Which means that if the maintainer wants to delete the draft GitHub release, they would also have to revert that commit too.

[blink1073]

Yeah, I don't see a way around that, since the assets are tied to the version bump commit.

[andrii-i]

Seeing built artifacts as a part of the prep release would help to diagnose problems with built artifacts like here #592 before they would fail at publish release preventing some assets from uploading.

[jtpio]

Maybe we could look into decoupling the assets upload from the commit to allow for this.

[krassowski]

For what it's wort, jupyter-scheduler artifacts are uploaded in check-release action, e.g. for the latest commit: https://github.com/jupyter-server/jupyter-scheduler/actions/runs/11809051201/job/32898683727. You need to click on "Summary" to see them: https://github.com/jupyter-server/jupyter-scheduler/actions/runs/11809051201

You can then go to Build action https://github.com/jupyter-server/jupyter-scheduler/actions/runs/11809051198/job/32898683728 again press "Summary" and see artifacts generated by hatch. These indeed differ in size.