release: Rancher main branch is not updated with latest Turtles release

[anmazzotti]

Something is wrong with our release process.
The main branch still includes an older RC of Turtles, see: https://github.com/rancher/rancher/blob/main/pkg/buildconfig/constants.go#L12

Changes only have been applied to the release branch, see: https://github.com/rancher/rancher/pull/54248/changes

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[salasberryfin]

My understanding is that, now that there's a release branch, main will only be used for future development and we'll eventually be updating this to v0.27.0 for Rancher v2.15.

We can update the Turtles version in main for clarity but I don't think it's technically required and it looks like other projects, i.e. Fleet, are doing the same.

If we think that aligning versions in main and the most recent release branch is cleaner, we can update the release guide to reflect this. It currently only references the release branch as target:

Submit PR against the following rancher/rancher branch (e.g. release/v2.12): release/v2.12
This must be set to the rancher/rancher branch that needs to be updated, with the new Turtles release. release/v2.12 is used for Rancher 2.12.x, release/v2.13 is used for Rancher 2.13.x and so on.

[anmazzotti]

What about daily tests and builds from Rancher main branch? Wouldn't they find an inconsistent (older) version of Turtles instead?

I think as a rule of thumb the release process should always end up sending PRs against main and we should backport those if there is a Rancher release branch already.

The exception is for previous Turtles releases, those should just target the related Rancher release branch.

[salasberryfin]

It's a fair point but I can think of corner cases that create conflicts based on how main and release/* are used.

Let's take for example the current point in the release lifecycle:

• release/v2.14 branch is available and any new Turtles versions that target v2.14.x should be added there.
• We now start working on the next minor v2.15 and eventually new Turtles RCs for v0.27.0 will make it to rancher/rancher main.
• At some point we keep publishing Turtles versions for new v2.14 patches while also creating new RCs in preparation for v2.15.0. The same is happening now with v2.13.x and v2.14.0.

The version referenced in main should be the latest available release of Turtles, and patch versions from earlier minors should not target main.

Does this make sense?