Automate new builds/releases after Augur, Auspice, etc. releases

[tsibley]

Releases of Augur and Auspice (and maybe one or two other?) trigger new builds/releases of our Docker runtime image by triggering the CI of nextstrain/docker-base. This repo's CI should also be triggered by new Augur and Auspice (and maybe other) internal upstream releases, with the caveat that they should wait until after the Conda packages for those projects are also released (since that's what consumed here). Since those are Bioconda recipes, it might be more hard to trigger directly. Instead we might:

• Poll the Anaconda API for new versions in the Bioconda channel using a scheduled action in this repo.
• Register webhooks for Bioconda repo events and trigger upon receiving them.
• Moving Conda packaging for Augur and Auspice into their respective repos and publishing on our own channel instead.

[jameshadfield]

While we're thinking about this, it would be good to automate the bioconda PRs for auspice. Currently one has to wait ~15min for the npm release to be registered before making a manual PR to bioconda. I don't know how augur works here.

[tsibley]

Bioconda has an regular updater process that notices new PyPI releases.

We have an open issue for automating Bioconda updates for Auspice, with suggested solutions.

[victorlin]

publishing on our own channel instead

I was just thinking about this today. I vote for this, since it allows us to skip the manual approval process required to make our packages available on Bioconda, which is dependent on external availability and can take several hours.

Bioconda is likely to remain the popular choice for ambient runtimes, so maybe this should be done in addition to, rather than replacing, the Bioconda package.

[victorlin]

This was discussed during today's dev chat.

• For publishing on our own channel, we would have to consider how to handle build dependencies under the hood, which is something the Bioconda/conda-forge have already set up.
• Another solution is to make conda-base work with unmerged Bioconda PRs for Augur/Auspice/etc.

Thinking through all the options again, I'm +1 for the approach of "Poll the Anaconda API for new versions in the Bioconda channel using a scheduled action in this repo."