tools: add release-helper

[ruyadorno]

Adds a release-helper script that orchestrates the multiple tools used during the cherry picking steps when working on a release line branch. Aiming to simplify and speed up the manual cherry-pick / commit review process of each release.

cc @nodejs/releasers

[ruyadorno]

@nodejs/releasers I'm just dropping here this draft that I have been using for the last couple of releases I've worked on that tries to tackle the challenge of automating the most manual part of the release process, the cherry-pick / commit review part. In its current form it provides a cached version of the commits fetched from branch-diff which avoids hitting the GitHub API rate limits and has handy commands to ask original authors for backports and continuing / skipping commits after that.

I'd like to get an initial input and potentially see how we can turn this into a more useful tool for the team.

[richardlau]

Could this be added to node-core-utils instead?

[ruyadorno]

Could this be added to node-core-utils instead?

That's a good idea! It might be a better fit to have it be part of node-core-utils specially given that many other release automation workflows are currently living there too.

For now I just wanted to share the initial ideas of what I've been using here and I'm also planning to write a few examples showing how I've been using it so that maybe some of these ideas can be improved.