[nssalian]

Adds the 1.12.0 release notes.

The highlights were curated from the full set of changes between 1.11.0 and the 1.12.0 RC. To reproduce or cross-check the source list:

git log --no-merges apache-iceberg-1.11.0..apache-iceberg-1.12.0-rc2

I went through that diff and selected the notable user-facing items: Variant (uniform shredding, vectorized unshredded reads), geospatial read/write, Flink equality-delete to deletion-vector conversion, Hilbert-curve clustering, V4 foundations, REST additions, correctness fixes, and dependency updates. Routine build, CI, test, and backport commits are left out.

Files changed: site/docs/releases.md, site/nav.yml, site/mkdocs.yml.

Note: this depends on the versioned-docs 1.12.0/ folder being present on the docs branch i.e . #18316

[nssalian]

Will rebase once the dependent versioning docs goes in

[nssalian]

Fixed the CI and cleaned up the commits - it was waiting on the javadoc and versioned doc PRs that went in.

[szehon-ho]

Do you we need add the behavior change about the Geo Type toString?

[nssalian]

Thanks @szehon-ho. I added (#16765) under the "Behavior change" section.

[szehon-ho]

Two worthwhile additions to the release notes are the manifest-rewrite first-row-ID fix (#16699) and scan-based dangling-delete cleanup (#15727).

[nssalian]

Thanks @szehon-ho - done all the requested changes. Did another pass and added a few more that were missing:
#15750, #18045,
#18046, #17947,
#18065, #17544, and #17403.

[szehon-ho]

One worthwhile addition is #16692: it fixes Parquet row-group pruning dropping matching rows from older files after a column is added with an initial default.

[nssalian]

Did another pass: updated with some Flink clarifications and the deprecated PRs. Added Peter and Max to see if Flink is good.

[mxm]

Thanks for compiling these, Neelesh! Looks good to me, just two cosmetic comments.