Adding workflow_dispatch to release GH action

[rearden888]

He folks, I noticed I often find myself waiting until the evening run of the release GH action before the package files are built against a new version of the kernel. I tend to update my machine first thing in the morning, and have noticed the lag a few times. Not a big deal, but I thought we could add a manual "workflow_dispatch" trigger to the release.yml action so if one of us who is part of the project recognizes it, we could respond immediately and manually trigger a build. It's a simple change, and I could certainly send a pull request, but thought I'd bring up the idea first. I have it working on a fork in my own account.

Only downside I can see is using marginally more resources, but we'd build new packages for users sooner.

[loadedice]

I'm in the same boat, and I reckon depending on your timezone you may be affected more by this than others are.

What about automating this though?

I have an open PR that adds a new workflow called "watcher" that watches for new kernel updates and triggers the build pipeline: #627 This would hopefully mean you wouldn't ever need to manually trigger the release pipeline to make a new build.

I've also been testing in the testing repo speeding up the release workflow by only rebuilding the kernels that need an update: archzfs@511ea0a but theres some work I want to do before I raise that PR (also depends on the first PR )

With both of these combined it I estimate in the absolute worst case we'd be ~1h 50m behind releasing an update:

• Watcher is triggered every 1h
• build & release for 1 kernel takes ~10 min https://github.com/archzfs/archzfs-testing/actions/runs/22248936143
  • We can probably get this even faster if we want to
  • In cases where we need to update all 4 kernels it goes up to ~25 minutes
  • So far with a week of data I've only observed 1 kernel at a time being updated, but it's not really enough time
• Some unknown amount of lag for the mirror we're checking to update, lets say 30 minutes.
  • Retriggering a build manually won't help here unless you force another mirror that is more up to date.
  • Users are probably affected by some form of mirror lag too anyway.

And I don't have any real world data but I imagine in practise it's going to be less than 1 hour behind, because we'd have to get pretty unlucky to have to wait the full 1 hour for the watcher to re-trigger. But I will also say that GH actions seems to be a bit unreliable with triggering this action sometimes it skips an hour.