docs: document forcing an off-cycle release

Jay McCurerequested to merge
jmc-document-forcing-off-cycle-release into main

What does this MR do?

Documents that the weekly release schedule can be run on demand to cut a release immediately, and corrects the documented release cadence.

docs/release_process.md previously offered only two paths: wait for the weekly schedule, or hand-tag main. It steered readers to hand-tagging for anything off-cycle. But tag-release gates on $CI_PIPELINE_SOURCE == "schedule" && $RELEASE_SCHEDULE == "true", and playing a schedule keeps CI_PIPELINE_SOURCE == "schedule" along with the schedule's inputs — so pressing play cuts a release through exactly the same path, with the version bump derived from the commits and the tag created by GITLAB_TOKEN_RELEASE.

Changes:

  • New Forcing a release off-cycle section: how to trigger it (play button or glab schedule run), the Maintainer requirement, and the three cases worth knowing (no releasable commits, breaking change, can't pick the version).
  • Narrows the pointer to the manual process to what it's actually for: choosing a version number, or cutting a major.
  • Fixes the cadence. The docs said "every Sunday"; the schedule is 0 12 * * 2 Etc/UTC, so Tuesdays at 12:00 UTC.

Author's checklist

  • Follows the documentation guidelines
  • Documentation-only change; no code, no make gen-docs output affected (nothing under docs/source/)

Verified locally with markdownlint-cli2, vale --minAlertLevel error, and lychee, plus a full lefthook run pre-push.

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