[Discussion] Release process enhancement to enable patch releases

[saraswatpuneet]

Issue

Currently our release flow involves running benchmarks and updating weights followed by release, this is fine but it prevents us from ever releasing patches without altering metadata such as for api-augment, since updated weights delta, however small, alters the metadata from chain state.

Potential solutions

• Introduce the ability to release patches similar to polkadot using hyphenated numbers
• Skip benchmarks and use weight from base release branch
• This would look like 1.17.5-2 -3 ...
• Finally the new metadata should match current release metadata from which it is extended

Better suggestions around standardizing how we do patch releases are welcome