Go: x/build/cmd/releasebot: build releases regularly, automatically

[bradfitz]

Every release comes with surprises/problems with releasebot.

If releasebot was always running it would be less scary and prone to breakage.

Or we'd catch problems earlier.

We should be building automatic unsigned releases all the time. (at least daily, if not hourly)

/cc @dmitshur @andybons @bcmills @toothrot @cagedmantis

[bcmills]

Some open-source projects release continuous “nightly” pre-release builds. Perhaps we could do the same?

[bradfitz]

That's basically what I said above ("at least daily, if not hourly")

But we could even go one further: we move the cmd/release + releaselet code into a package used by the coordinator and run it on every post-submit build and save the results to GCS (like we already do post-make.bash).

Then x/build/cmd/release basically does nothing except wait for the unsigned build to finish building normally and then pulls the unsigned builds from GCS for signing and uploads them to the right place post-signing.

Then the golang.org/dl/ handler could be modified to have some ?mode=nightly view that shows the recent unsigned binaries/installers served directly from the existing GCS snapshots.

[smasher164]

I think that this process is key to reducing the number of minor revisions. 1.11 and 1.12 have had the greatest number of minor revisions, so it looks like the trend has been that the number increases with every major release.

[andybons]

@smasher164 we switched to doing monthly point releases during that time, so it's an unrelated metric.

[smasher164]

@smasher164 we switched to doing monthly point releases during that time, so it's an unrelated metric.

My bad, I didn't realize that the monthly point releases were part of a new policy.

[gopherbot]

Change https://golang.org/cl/229483 mentions this issue: cmd/golangorg: generate major version list on Go project page

[gopherbot]

Change https://golang.org/cl/229482 mentions this issue: content/static/doc: copy The Go Project page (contrib.html) from Go repo

[gopherbot]

Change https://golang.org/cl/245277 mentions this issue: maintner/maintnerd/maintapi/version: support beta and RC release tags