Brave Release Minor Updates

Overview

Minor updates happen between major releases and don't affect the release schedule outlined via https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Brave-Release-Schedule

Maintenance Release

These would be planned releases where we'll deliver bug fixes.

Hotfix Release

• Intended to provide a critical update
• Intended for when P1 issues are found/fixed in Brave.

Minor Chromium release

When Chromium updates are released we're going to commit to getting a new Brave release out within 24 hours. The release will include only the Chromium update.

Process for Minor Chromium release

Note: some specifics for this may change; this was the process followed for 1.35.x release 4.

1. Create the milestones in brave-browser and brave-core. For example 1.35.x - Release 4
2. Create an issue to track this (ex: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/21241) and put into the milestone
3. Find the latest Desktop and Android tags. An easy way to find would be to look at CHANGELOG_DESKTOP.md and CHANGELOG_ANDROID.md. Most of the time the tags are the same 👍
4. We can create a new branch based on this tag. If the tags are the same, we only need one branch. If they are different we can make two branches. For example, if https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/releases/tag/v1.35.103 is the tag, we can run:

   cd /your-folder-here/brave-browser/
   git fetch --tags
   git checkout -b 1.35.release4 v1.35.103
   git push -u origin 1.35.release4
   cd src/brave
   git checkout -b 1.35.release4 v1.35.103
   git push -u origin 1.35.release4
   

5. Run the chromium-update-minor job (https://ci.brave.com/view/wip/job/chromium-update-minor/) and specify the branch (ex: 1.35.release4). This will create a new branch (ex: 1.35.release4-98.0.4758.109). If this fails, attempt the Chromium update manually. If the tags are NOT the same for Desktop and Android, we'll have needed to create two branches (ex: 1.35.release4 and 1.35.release4android) and cherry-pick the Chromium update from 1.35.release4 over to 1.35.release4android
6. Pull request the branch (1.35.release4-98.0.4758.109 merging into 1.35.release4)
7. Uplift approvers group will Review / Approve / Merge
8. We can start the build via the brave-browser-build job. NOTE: We may need to ask for devops support if we can't provide this branch name in the job parameters
9. Once build completes and QA verifies it, merge this branch (1.35.release4) into the major version branch (1.35.x).