Proposal: Automate Deployment and Changelog Generation

[hozan23]

Hello

I'd like to propose a couple of improvements to the repository:

• Automated Deployment to crates.io:

  Currently, the deployment of datafusion-federation and datafusion-flight-sql-server crates to crates.io is done manually. We could use github actions to automate the deployment process for all the crates in this repository.

• Automated Changelog Generation:

  It would be helpful to generate a changelog for new releases of datafusion-federation crate automatically.

I came across the tool release-plz that could help with both automating the deployment to crates.io and generating changelogs. It also supports version bumping based on conventional commits.

Please let me know your thoughts on this.

@backkem @phillipleblanc @nathanielc
Thank you

[phillipleblanc]

+1 from me.

One way to do this is to leverage GitHub releases. There is a way to automatically generate release notes via GitHub releases (https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/releasing-projects-on-github/automatically-generated-release-notes) and you can trigger workflows based on a release being created that will go and deploy to crates.io.

Here is an example of the auto-generated release notes: https://github.com/datafusion-contrib/datafusion-table-providers/releases/tag/v0.2.3

[nathanielc]

+1 from me as well. I use conventional commits out of habit these days anyway. I am not too picky on how it gets done, I have had success with cargo based tooling for generating both the release notes and publishing to crates.io. If its helpful here are some workflows that do this for another rust project I work on.

The process of creating a release is to run the create a release workflow manually when we want to create a release. It then creates a PR we can review the release notes etc. When the PR merges the second workflow picks it up and publishes the release to github/crates.io.

We don't need that involved of a process but thought I'd share in case its useful.

[hozan23]

Thank you @phillipleblanc and @nathanielc for your suggestions.
I will create a PR soon and submit it for your review.