Migrate Release Tooling

[parthea]

Creating an issue to track migrating the release tooling from GH Action to Kokoro.

[pjonsson]

@parthea Since this is blocking the 1.6.0 release, what remains to be done for this work to be completed?

[parthea]

In terms of next steps, I believe #51 needs to be reverted. The build scripts need to be updated to build the binaries in Kokoro. I'm not actively working on it. @andrewsg, do you know if this work been scheduled? If not, can you provide a ballpark ETA?

[andrewsg]

2024 Q2 is my ballpark ETA. I wouldn't describe the work as scheduled exactly.

[pjonsson]

@andrewsg @parthea I realize this isn't an issue for Google, but the python3 package (https://packages.ubuntu.com/noble/python3) in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is Python 3.12.

The 1.6 release has been blocked since late November, and I get the impression that the work in this ticket could slip beyond Q2, could you make the 1.6 release (or a 1.5.1 release) before that?

[Oscmage]

Given that this impacts the performance of the bigquery client which mentions 3.12 support (among other google libraries I assume) I think it would be nice to get this prioritised. It was quite misleading for us to bump to 3.12 after looking at google libraries saying it supports 3.12 and then realise that it works but with worse performance than if we were to run 3.11. Python 3.12 has been released for almost 7 months now and the only option is to build from source if we want to run 3.12.