Improve release automation using xtask

[jessebraham]

Currently, largely due to the sheer number of packages in this repository, releasing is a bit of a headache to put it mildly. Let's please discuss how we can automate this process to remove the possibility of human error as much as possible.

Some possible improvements:

• Determine which packages have changes, and why type of version increase the changes warrant (e.g. minor, patch)
• Automatically bump version numbers as needed, and update any dependent packages in the repository accordingly
  • Not fully automated (still not sure that's possible) but Modify bump-version subcommand to also bump dependent packages' dependencies #2514 essentially accomplishes this
• Automatically update CHANGELOG.md files prior to releasing
• Publish packages automagically
  • Add a publish subcommand to the xtask (which performs a dry-run by default) #2539

@MabezDev @tom-borcin let's please discuss this tomorrow in our meeting.

[AnthonyGrondin]

My 2 cents;

I've been using the following tool: https://github.com/clog-tool/clog-lib for a while in one of my project and it's been going well. If this helps with the mentioned points above, that's good.

[bjoernQ]

I think the list of items is already quite complete - if we had all of this releasing would be a breeze :)

I have doubts about the first item however (the automatic part) but would love to get proved wrong

[jessebraham]

I don't know if I'm just slow or what, but I have tried cargo-semver-checks multiple times now and failed to ever get it working, constantly getting new horrifying errors, so unfortunately at this point I'm going to rule this out as a possibility. If anybody else has had success using this for embedded libraries I would love to hear how you got it working.

I will see if I can try to come up with some alternative approach.

[jessebraham]

I don't think the first item in the task list is reasonably possible at this point, this will still require manual review.