Build automation to check the status of stable branches

As part of the extension of the maintenance policy &828 (closed), new steps were added to the patch release and security release templates, requiring release managers to manually check the stable branches status for all the projects under GitLab managed versioning.

Example

• Verify pipelines on default and stable branches on GitLab are green:

  • Default branch
  • 15-9-stable-ee
  • 15-8-stable-ee
  • 15-7-stable-ee

• Verify pipelines on the GitLab projects are green:

• cng-ee

  • Default branch
  • 15-9-stable
  • 15-8-stable
  • 15-7-stable

• gitaly

  • Default branch
  • 15-9-stable
  • 15-8-stable
  • 15-7-stable

• gitlab-pages

  • Default branch
  • 15-9-stable
  • 15-8-stable
  • 15-7-stable

• omnibus-gitlab-ee

  • Default branch
  • 15-9-stable
  • 15-8-stable
  • 15-7-stable

Considering we have around 5 projects under managed versioning and three stable branches each, this becomes a super manual task.

Proposal: Create a new command to automatically check the status of stable branches

A ChatOps command, e.g. /chatops run check stable_branches, could be introduced to automatically verify the status of stable branches for the projects under managed versioning. If a stable branch is broken, then it should be reported by the bot.