Automate Java SDK releases

[eamsden]

What changed?

• Automate releases, triggered introducing new version headings in Changelog

Why?

We want to automate all releases. Java in particular ships the test server and footguns in the manual release pipelines have resulted in incidents breaking customer CI.

Breaking changes?

None.

Server PR

N/A.

Testing

• .github/scripts/test-release.sh
• ./gradlew --offline spotlessCheck
• Parsed .github/workflows/release.yml with Ruby's YAML parser.
• git diff --check origin/main...HEAD

[Quinn-With-Two-Ns]

I did a AI assisted review and found a few issues

For a pull request, the workflow passes the current target branch SHA as BASE_SHA and the feature branch SHA as HEAD_SHA. The candidate script requires BASE_SHA to be an ancestor of HEAD_SHA. Once main advances after a feature branch is created, that condition is false even for a valid, mergeable PR. This also rejects ordinary PRs that only add notes under [Unreleased]. I reproduced this with a small Git repository: branch feature, advance main, add a changelog entry on feature, and run release.sh candidate with the two branch heads. It exits 1 with The base commit must be an ancestor of the release commit. The new test fixture uses a linear history and misses this case. I think this would impact us if we needed to do a patch release of old versions. The setup instructions say to restrict that environment to main but we should also be able to release from other branches for back-porting fixes .

[eamsden]

I think this would impact us if we needed to do a patch release of old versions. The setup instructions say to restrict that environment to main but we should also be able to release from other branches for back-porting fixes .

I checked the last time we did a branch release and it was quite a while ago, so I wasn't sure if we should support that out of the box. I can make sure it is supported though.