docs: add release process developer guide

[ko3n1g]

Summary

• Adds docs/releases/release-process.md documenting the 2-month release cycle, RC cadence (RC0–RC3 + weeks 5–7), golden values policy, code-freeze phases, and CI ticket-annotation maintenance rules
• Links the new guide from docs/releases/README.md and docs/index.md (Sphinx toctree)

Example

The new RC cadence table:

RC	Approximate Timing	Key Activity
RC0	Week 1 (7th–10th)	Major dependency bump: NGC PyTorch
RC1	Week 2	Dependency bump: TransformerEngine
RC2	Week 3	Feature development continues
RC3	Week 4	Code-freeze begins
	Week 5	Bug fixes, small improvements
	Week 6	Bug fixes, small improvements
	Week 7	QA exit, release

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

Summary by CodeRabbit

• Documentation
  • Added comprehensive release process documentation detailing the release cycle, candidate version scheduling, code-freeze workflows, CI behavior, and deployment timelines.

[coderabbitai]

📝 Walkthrough

Walkthrough

Introduces comprehensive release process documentation by adding a new release-process.md file and updating navigation indices to make the guide discoverable. The document covers RC creation timing, development phases, code-freeze procedures, golden values handling, CI behavior for annotated tests, and release deployment rules.

Changes

Cohort / File(s)	Summary
Release Process Documentation docs/releases/release-process.md	New guide documenting RC creation cadence (weekly Saturday through RC2, then as-needed), feature/stabilization/fix phases, golden value update rules, code-freeze workflow timing, CI annotation behavior for test errors, and release deployment on first Wednesday post-code-freeze.
Documentation Navigation Updates docs/index.md, docs/releases/README.md	Added release-process.md entry to the Releases toctree and releases documentation index table with links and purpose description.

Estimated code review effort

🎯 1 (Trivial) | ⏱️ ~3 minutes

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 4

✅ Passed checks (4 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Description Check	✅ Passed	Check skipped - CodeRabbit’s high-level summary is enabled.
Title check	✅ Passed	The title 'docs: add release process developer guide' directly summarizes the main change: adding a new release process developer guide document to the documentation.
Docstring Coverage	✅ Passed	No functions found in the changed files to evaluate docstring coverage. Skipping docstring coverage check.
Test Results For Major Changes	✅ Passed	PR contains only documentation changes with no modifications to executable code, features, or APIs. Documentation-only changes are minor and do not require test results.

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✨ Finishing Touches

🧪 Generate unit tests (beta)

• Create PR with unit tests
• Commit unit tests in branch ko3n1g/docs/release-process-guide

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[coderabbitai]

Actionable comments posted: 1

🤖 Prompt for all review comments with AI agents

Verify each finding against the current code and only fix it if needed.

Inline comments:
In `@docs/releases/release-process.md`:
- Around line 11-21: The table in the release-process doc mixes a "Saturday"
cadence with a multi-day date example (e.g., the "RC0 | Week 1 (7th–10th)" row),
which is ambiguous; update the table entries for RC0–RC3 to use consistent
week-based labels or explicitly mark any multi-day ranges as "approximate" or
"window" (e.g., change "Week 1 (7th–10th)" to "Week 1 (approx. 7th–10th)" or
simply "Week 1") and ensure the top text (the sentence about Saturdays)
clarifies that RCs are cut on a Saturday within those week windows; adjust rows
referenced by RC0, RC1, RC2, RC3 accordingly.

🪄 Autofix (Beta)

Fix all unresolved CodeRabbit comments on this PR:

• Push a commit to this branch (recommended)
• Create a new PR with the fixes

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ℹ️ Review info

⚙️ Run configuration

Configuration used: Path: .coderabbit.yaml

Review profile: CHILL

Plan: Pro

Run ID: 83efebed-0c34-4fdb-8cf6-f7693e8e38bf

📥 Commits

Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between 39b4a5b and 76cca92.

📒 Files selected for processing (3)

• docs/index.md
• docs/releases/README.md
• docs/releases/release-process.md

[coderabbitai]

⚠️ Potential issue | 🟡 Minor

Clarify Saturday cadence vs date-range example to avoid ambiguity.

Line 11 states RCs are cut every Saturday, but Line 15 shows “Week 1 (7th–10th)”, which reads as a multi-day window. Consider making the table strictly week-based (or explicitly marking date ranges as approximate windows).

🤖 Prompt for AI Agents

Verify each finding against the current code and only fix it if needed.

In `@docs/releases/release-process.md` around lines 11 - 21, The table in the
release-process doc mixes a "Saturday" cadence with a multi-day date example
(e.g., the "RC0 | Week 1 (7th–10th)" row), which is ambiguous; update the table
entries for RC0–RC3 to use consistent week-based labels or explicitly mark any
multi-day ranges as "approximate" or "window" (e.g., change "Week 1 (7th–10th)"
to "Week 1 (approx. 7th–10th)" or simply "Week 1") and ensure the top text (the
sentence about Saturdays) clarifies that RCs are cut on a Saturday within those
week windows; adjust rows referenced by RC0, RC1, RC2, RC3 accordingly.