ci: automate major release tasks

[goosewobbler]

Closes #959.

This includes:

• Automated update of dependabot.yml
• Reusable workflows
• Updated development documentation to reflect new release process
• Automated branch lifecycle management
  • Automatic creation of branches during major releases
    • feature
    • maintenance
  • Automatic archiving (deletion) of old maintenance branches
• Enhanced automation for major releases
  • Automatic dependabot.yml updates for new maintenance branch
  • Automatic merge of feature branch to main
• Updated release workflows to use dynamic branch resolution
  • feature → automatically resolves to next major version branch (e.g., feature/v9)
  • main → current stable version
  • maintenance → automatically resolves to previous version branch (e.g., v7.x)
• Enhanced backporting process
  • Dynamic version detection from package.json
  • Interactive version confirmation when auto-detection fails
  • Improved error handling and user feedback
  • Clear version information display during execution
• Rework of labels and strategy for usage
• Updated documentation for all of the above

[goosewobbler]

WIP as I am evaluating the different approaches for updating dependabot.yml

[mato533]

@goosewobbler
My idea is using yp to rewrite yaml config as simple way. I hope you like it.

https://github.com/marketplace/actions/yq-portable-yaml-processor

Implementation image on the Github Actions is follows.

- name: Replace dependabot config
  uses: mikefarah/yq@v4.45.1
  with:
    cmd: yq -i '.updates[1].target-branch = "v8"' '.github/dependabot.yml'

[mato533]

@goosewobbler
I have created the PR to this PR. I hope it could be your help.

[goosewobbler]

@mato533 sorry I didn't get time to look at this recently. The yq approach for updating the dependabot config seems sound, and I like the workflow reuse. I'll close this PR and use yours as a base for this piece of work.

EDIT: actually I see your PR is an update to this one, I'll merge and use this as the base.

[mato533]

Good! I'm glad you like it.

[goosewobbler]

@mato533 I updated a few things here, we're now handling the branch management as part of the release, and the backporting has some changes too. I did this quite quickly so if you could check it through.

[mato533]

@goosewobbler
Thank you for update and merging my PR!
I am testing my repo... and looking at how TAGging can be done properly. We are close to a solution and will put it together in a PR when it is ready!

[goosewobbler]

@mato533 I moved things around and added a split between prepare and publish. Definitely close...

[mato533]

@goosewobbler
year, we are close...
turbo-version is error. I think turbo-version should be before publish....

[mato533]

@goosewobbler
I have created the PR #1007 as review.(It was complex to express here.)
It included the fixes of tagging operation.

[goosewobbler]

A lot more went into this one than I thought it would take initially, but it's important to have a proper automated release process.

[mato533]

The normal system appears to be working properly!

[mato533]

@goosewobbler
There are likely to be some precautions that you were not aware of.

I am aware that I need to manually merge the feature branch into the main branch before running this Workflow. (It is expected, and the logs will show this.) When doing this merge, the package.json will always be conflicted.
How to resolve this is that you must always specify the current version of the main branch. (calculations don't work properly).
(e.g. if version of package.json is follows: main=9.x.y, feature/v10= 10.x.y.next-z, we need to make sure that the result of merge is 9.x.y at the version field of package.json.)