Introduce a GitHub Actions workflow for bumping the version number in a branch

[johnbillion]

The process for bumping the version number of WordPress within a branch is highly manual and error prone. If a mistake is made or a test fails then it greatly slows down the release process for a branch while the automated test suites run again.

A GitHub Actions workflow should be introduced which:

• Accepts a WordPress version number input in major.minor format
• Bumps the minor version number in all the required files in that branch (eg. from 6.5.0 to 6.5.1)
• Opens a PR with the changes so the tests can run
• Runs sanity checks to ensure that the about.php page already includes a changelog entry for that version, and fails the build if so

Files to update

• wp-includes/version.php
• package.json
• package-lock.json

[jorbin]

I started on a proof of concept for this that can be seen at

• Workflow File - ​https://github.com/aaronjorbin/tmp-trac-60966/blob/trunk/.github/workflows/create-pr-version.yml
• Workflow Run - ​https://github.com/aaronjorbin/tmp-trac-60966/actions/runs/8725402099/job/23938282903
• PR Created - ​https://github.com/aaronjorbin/tmp-trac-60966/pull/9/files

A couple of observations/thoughts:

1. I don't think that this can be run from wordpress/wordpress-develop since that is a synced repo and we don't want random branches being pushed to it. I'm not sure if it would be best for it to then be something individuals run from their own fork. Alternatively, this could be a bash oneliner that lives in the handbook and committers can run.
2. As of now, I haven't attempted anything for the about page. I think for tht it might be a few additional questions that get asked, namely: How many bugs are being fixed? How many Security Issues are being fixed? It could then generate the strings and include them as a comment on the PR but it would be up to the committer to add them to the correct spot.

[desrosj]

I'd like to take a look at several of these GitHub Actions related improvements during 7.0. Placing this in the milestone to have a look once 6.9 is released.