Release Management

How to use this skill

Attach this file to your Copilot Chat context when preparing a release, verifying release readiness, or answering questions about versioning and publishing flow.

Related skills

• Dependency Management — dependency updates that affect release content and risk
• PR Readiness Review — ensure changes are release-ready before merge
• Breaking Change Analysis — evaluate and communicate major-version impact

How Releases Work

Releases are fully automated via release-please and the .github/workflows/release.yml workflow:

1. Developers merge PRs with conventional commit messages into main
2. release-please automatically opens (and keeps updated) a release PR that bumps lib/git/version.rb and regenerates CHANGELOG.md
3. When a maintainer merges the release PR, release-please creates a GitHub release with a tag
4. The workflow then publishes the gem to RubyGems.org via rubygems/release-gem

Key config files:

The versioning strategy is prerelease with beta as the prerelease type. The config also sets bump-minor-pre-major: true and bump-patch-for-minor-pre-major: true.

Developer Responsibilities

The only thing developers need to do for releases is use conventional commit messages. release-please determines the version bump from commit types:

• fix: → patch bump
• feat: → minor bump
• feat!: or BREAKING CHANGE: footer → major bump

Everything else (version bump, changelog, tag, gem push) is automated. Do not manually edit lib/git/version.rb or CHANGELOG.md.

Checking Release Readiness

Before a maintainer merges a release PR:

1. Ensure CI passes on main:

   bundle exec rake default
   

2. Review unreleased changes since last tag:

   git log $(git describe --tags --abbrev=0)..HEAD --oneline
   

3. Check for open blockers:

   gh issue list --label "bug" --state open
   

4. Review the release PR — verify the auto-generated changelog and version bump look correct.

What NOT to Do

• Do not manually bump lib/git/version.rb — release-please does this
• Do not manually edit CHANGELOG.md — it is auto-generated from commits
• Do not manually create tags — release-please creates them on merge
• Do not manually gem push — the workflow handles publishing
• Do not force-push or rebase the release PR — release-please manages it

Useful Commands

# View recent tags
git tag -l --sort=-v:refname | head -10

# List commits since last release
git log $(git describe --tags --abbrev=0)..HEAD --oneline

# Compare with previous release
git diff $(git describe --tags --abbrev=0)..HEAD

# Check current version
ruby -e "require_relative 'lib/git/version'; puts Git::VERSION"

# View release-please config
cat .release-please-config.json | jq .

# Build gem locally (for testing only)
bundle exec rake build
gem install pkg/git-*.gem