Developer story
As a community user of WMCO, I want regular releases of the community operator published every sprint so that I can access the latest features, bug fixes, and improvements in a timely manner through OperatorHub.
 
 

Description

This story establishes a process to publish a new WMCO community operator version every sprint (approximately every 2-3 weeks), ensuring community users have timely access to the latest improvements and maintaining better alignment with the Red Hat operator releases.

The community operator is distributed through OperatorHub as the "Community Windows Machine Config Operator" and is marked as preview/not production-ready. 

The process should be streamlined to minimize manual effort, leveraging existing automation where possible (community-4.x branches and the COMMUNITY=true CI flag), and should include clear documentation and checklists to make the release process repeatable by any team member.
 

Required

• Document a streamlined checklist for community operator releases in hack/community/readme.md
• Ensure the community operator version is tested via the existing community-4.x branch CI process before publication

Nice to have

• Automate PR creation to community-operators-prod repository with pre-filled changes
   

Engineering Details

• Related JIRA Issues:
• WINC-1038: Community operator publishing cadence tracking
• WINC-174: Community operator improvements and automation
• WINC-1175: Process documentation and best practices

• Process Documentation: `hack/community/readme.md`
• Key Files and Scripts:
• `hack/community/generate.sh` - Generates community manifests with proper transformations
• Target Repository: `https://github.com/redhat-openshift-ecosystem/community-operators-prod`
• Operator path: `operators/community-windows-machine-config-operator/<version>/`

Acceptance Criteria

-  A community operator release is successfully published
-  Each community operator release is tested using the community-4.x branch CI before publication