After pushing and tagging a release commit, build.yaml should rebase the staging branch on top of main.

[jenstroeger]

For details, see #259 (comment).

[jenstroeger]

As per linked comment:

This (change) would hardwire the branch name staging into the process, though, and maybe we should make it configurable (somewhat related to #259 (comment))?

I’m ok with using staging in the Action itself, and then document in the README that users may want to change that branch name. I’ve seen develop or beta used in the same scenario.

[jenstroeger]

So I think we want to add another step after this one:

python-package-template/.github/workflows/release.yaml

Lines 57 to 60 in 25c486b

	- name: Push the release
	run: |
	git push
	git push --tags

For example

--- a/.github/workflows/release.yaml
+++ b/.github/workflows/release.yaml
@@ -68,6 +68,13 @@ jobs:
         git push
         git push --tags
 
+    - name: Rebase staging branch
+      continue-on-error: true
+      run: |
+        git checkout staging
+        git rebase main
+        git push
+
   # When triggered by the version bump commit, build the package and publish the release artifacts.
   build:

We’ve already checked out all branches a few steps before:

python-package-template/.github/workflows/release.yaml

Lines 36 to 40 in 25c486b

	- name: Check out repository
	uses: actions/checkout@2541b1294d2704b0964813337f33b291d3f8596b # v3.0.2
	with:
	fetch-depth: 0
	token: ${{ secrets.REPO_ACCESS_TOKEN }}

That would only work, I think, if both main and staging branch keep their history in sync…

[behnazh]

Sounds fine with me. But before merging that we should investigate this whole branch protection vs automatic release through pull requests to make sure the histories would be in sync. At least we should understand why it's not working as we want in GitHub.

[jenstroeger]

There’s also this problem: what if the git rebase main fails because of conflicts? The chance is slim, but still somebody may have merged new commits into staging while the Release workflow was checking the new release…

[jenstroeger]

PR #536, commit 7d9f0a4.