Chore: update documentation and issue template due to tag-based releases

[lalver1]

Closes #1249

This PR, which updates the documentation and the New Release issue template, is the last followup to PR #2213.

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[lalver1]

Sorry, moving this back to draft again. I just remembered about Issue #1249 and I'm thinking that adding a new section called 'Making a rollback' under Making a release can be used to close #1249 using this PR, if that makes sense. The process is already laid out in the ticket and the docs would look very similar.

[thekaveman]

Maybe that can even be another type of release in the dropdown / instructions? E.g. Rollback

[lalver1]

Yep, that's a good idea, I'll add it as another type of release 👍

[lalver1]

Just a note: Since we delete the branch associated with a PR once a PR is merged, I thought that this might create a problem for our hotfix and rollback release processes (since a tag is created on the temporary branches that will get deleted once the hotfix or rollback is merged into main), but it looks like there won't be an issue since a branch is only a pointer to a commit, so the commit associated with the tag will exist even if the branch is deleted after it is merged.

[thekaveman]

Just a note: Since we delete the branch associated with a PR once a PR is merged, I thought that this might create a problem for our hotfix and rollback release processes (since a tag is created on the temporary branches that will get deleted once the hotfix or rollback is merged into main), but it looks like there won't be an issue since a branch is only a pointer to a commit, so the commit associated with the tag will exist even if the branch is deleted after it is merged.

Interesting... that would seem to mean we don't need to keep test and prod branches around then??

[lalver1]

Yep, it looks like we don't need to keep the test and prod branches since as long as there is a branch or a tag pointing to a commit, git's garbage collector won't remove the commit. But I still feel uneasy about removing test and prod, it's not likely, but what if GitHub has a slightly different implementation of this behavior and we lose the past releases 😨.
And, we'll probably get warnings similar to this one:

It corresponds to -rc6 that was on a branch that didn't get merged into main. My guess is that the previous releases will behave the same way, so we may just want to keep test and prod?

[thekaveman]

This is great. Just a few minor suggestions to add some more context, and a couple notes on wording.

One change that I do think we should make for Hotfix and Rollback is that we should be starting from the last known good release tag, not the last known good commit.

Obviously those are the same thing, but we should be primed to think about releases/versions and not so much commits when talking about these types of releases.

[angela-tran]

Great work on this so far @lalver1

Left some comments / questions

[thekaveman]

Very nice!

[lalver1]

Thanks for the helpful reviews and suggestions @angela-tran and @thekaveman !