Document the release lifecycle where a consumer maintainer can read it

[thedavidmeister]

Closes #381. Refs rainlanguage/rain.lib.hash#55 (and the PR closed unmerged there, rainlanguage/rain.lib.hash#88).

Where it lives, and why

README.md — a new ### Release lifecycle section, plus #### rainix-autopublish and #### rainix-tag-release entries alongside the other nine under ### Reusable Workflows.

The README already is the consumer-facing surface for reusable workflows: nine of eleven were documented there, each with its wrapper snippet, and the two that decide what a consumer actually publishes were the only ones missing. A maintainer looking up "the workflow I call" has one place they already look. A docs/ file would be a third location in a repo that has never had one, and CLAUDE.md rules itself out in its own first paragraph — it is for what an agent gets wrong, not for a contract.

Workflow comments cannot be the home either, and the proof is that the rules were already in them and still got re-derived downstream. They explain why a step is written the way it is, to whoever is editing that step, interleaved with nix develop invocations and template-injection notes. Someone arriving from a uses: line reads none of it.

So the two workflow files now point at the section instead of carrying the contract, and each keeps a header saying which reader it serves.

This is a move, not a copy

The rules previously existed as four partial copies that each carried a different subset. The fix would be worthless if it added a fifth:

• rainix-tag-release.yaml — the library/deploy block and the four-step release procedure are consumer contract, so they move to the README. The file keeps the mechanism-level "why" its own steps need: push-free because deploy mains are protected, the deploy excluded because a flaky retry-prone operation must not gate a one-shot tag publish, the publish guard failing closed.
• rainix-autopublish.yaml — the soldeer-package input description keeps what the input is and hands off what the pipeline does. A header comment now names the workflow's repo kind and points at the section.
• rainix-static/src/soldeer_gate.rs — module doc untouched. Different reader (whoever edits the gate), different question.

What the section states

Verified against the workflows as written and against soldeer_gate.rs (max_intent_tag, publish_version, require_full_history, strip_release_metadata) and ci_gate.rs, plus the loss paths recorded downstream at rainlanguage/rain.lib.hash#59 — not against anyone's memory of #333/#335:

• the library/deploy split as a table: workflow, trigger, whether it publishes, where the version comes from, [package].version, deploy pins;
• what "content changed" is measured over — the forge soldeer push --dry-run payload minus src/generated/ and minus foundry.toml's [external.package]/legacy [package] section with its attached comment block;
• the registry is the version ledger, max(patch_bump(newest published), highest next-v merged into HEAD), and the three consequences: every merge defaults to a patch, next-v<x.y.z> is the only way to say otherwise (reachable from the published head, inert once consumed, loud on a typo), and a first publish requires one as a seed;
• the two silent ways an intent tag is lost — pushed after the merge (invisible to the run that just published, then raises whatever merges next) or left on a PR head that a squash or rebase merge orphans; neither goes red, so the section gives the one form that works;
• a breaking change is a major only because a human tagged it — the pipeline never infers semver from a diff, and Nothing fails when a Solidity package public surface changes and the version bumps only a patch #327 is named as the gate that does not exist yet rather than papered over;
• foundry.toml carries no version by design — never read, never rewritten, excluded from the hash, so re-adding one publishes nothing;
• what gets written — the Soldeer lane pushes a tag ref and no branch, the cargo/npm lanes do commit and push;
• the deploy-repo release order — deploy, PR the snapshot, merge and tag, then verify-and-publish;
• the tag namespaces — sol-v* written, next-v* read, <crate>-v* / npm-* for the other lanes, and everything else invisible, including why a bare v<x.y.z> neither seeds nor blocks a version and how that leaves one version series across two namespaces in a repo whose first releases predate the pipeline.

QA

• Discriminating tests: n/a — the diff is prose, a workflow header comment and one workflow_call input description:. None of it is reachable by any test: a description has no effect on a run, and a # comment none on parsing. There is no assertion that could fail on base and pass here.
• Mutations applied: n/a for the same reason — there is no executable line to break. The equivalent discipline for a documentation change is that every claim is falsifiable against source, and each was read back out of the implementation before it was written down, listed below.
• Oracle: the implementation, read independently of the prose it was checked against. soldeer_gate.rs for the derivation (publish_version — patch bump of the newest registry revision, raised by intent only when strictly greater; first publish errors without a seed), the intent-tag rule (max_intent_tag — non-next-v prefixes skipped, so a bare v0.1.0 is inert; a malformed next-v remainder is Err, not a skip), reachability (run calls git tag --merged HEAD; require_full_history refuses a shallow checkout), and the content hash (norm_hash drops src/generated/, strip_release_metadata drops [external.package]/[package] plus the comment block above it). ci_gate.rs for "every other run on the commit green, and no runs at all is an error". rainix-autopublish.yaml L278-308 for tag-then-release with no branch push on the Soldeer lane and L314-344 for the cargo/npm lanes that do push. rainix-tag-release.yaml's guard job for tag-must-be-on-main and the Publish guard step for the fail-closed snapshot check. The wrapper snippets are the live ones from rain.lib.hash and rain.math.float.deploy, not invented.
• Scope note: the section also states that rainix-autopublish's cargo and npm lanes gate and version differently from the Soldeer lane, so the registry-ledger rules are not falsely stated as "library repos" for a crate-shipping repo.
• Category check: Release lifecycle is documented nowhere a consumer maintainer can read: the autopublish trigger, next-v intent tags, tag namespaces, foundry.toml's deliberately absent version, and what a breaking change means #381 asks for (a) a home a consumer maintainer reaches from the workflow they call, with the choice justified, (b) the autopublish trigger and change gate, (c) next-v intent tags, (d) foundry.toml's deliberately absent version, (e) the two tag namespaces, (f) what a breaking change means for the version, and (g) the move done as a move. All seven covered: (a) README ### Reusable Workflows + ### Release lifecycle, with both workflow headers pointing at it; (b)–(f) as itemised above; (g) the three bullets under "This is a move, not a copy".
• Formatting: README is deno fmt clean (the repo's own hook, which nix flake check runs); the full pre-commit set passed on commit (denofmt, yamlfmt, no-consumer-prettier).

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_01V8ViHcKLVk2YoS2joH4HdN

Summary by CodeRabbit

• Documentation

  • Added comprehensive release lifecycle guidance for library and deployment repositories.
  • Documented workflow usage, version sources, deployment order, snapshot creation, tagging, verification, and publishing behavior.
  • Updated workflow comments to direct maintainers to the README for the authoritative release contract.

• Chores

  • Clarified workflow descriptions without changing workflow behavior, inputs, secrets, or release steps.

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• README.md

📝 Walkthrough

Walkthrough

The README now documents the two reusable release workflows and their release rules. Workflow comments point to this documentation. No workflow execution logic changed.

Changes

Release lifecycle documentation

Layer / File(s)	Summary
Reusable workflow entry points .github/workflows/..., README.md	The README adds wrapper examples and caller requirements for the library and deploy release workflows.
README release contract README.md	The README documents repository-specific lifecycles, publish gates, version sources, version metadata, release order, and tag namespaces.
Workflow documentation alignment .github/workflows/...	Workflow comments and the soldeer-package input description now refer to the README for lifecycle rules. Workflow logic remains unchanged.

Priority: ⬇️ Low

Estimated code review effort: 2 (Simple) | ~10 minutes

Change: Other

Merge Risk: 🟡 Moderate · up to 2f890

Repositories using read-only default GitHub Actions permissions can follow the documented wrapper and have release publishing fail. Clarify the required permissions before merging.

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 5

✅ Passed checks (5 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Linked Issues check	✅ Passed	README.md adds the required consumer-facing Release lifecycle contract and entries for rainix-autopublish and rainix-tag-release, with wrapper snippets. It documents merge/content triggers, regi…
Out of Scope Changes check	✅ Passed	The changes are limited to the requested README documentation and related workflow comment updates. The comments support the documented release contract and retain implementation-level rationale. No u…
Docstring Coverage	✅ Passed	No functions found in the changed files to evaluate docstring coverage. Skipping docstring coverage check. Docstring coverage is scoped to functions touched by this diff. Analyzed 0 functions across 0…
Description Check	✅ Passed	Check skipped - CodeRabbit’s high-level summary is enabled.
Title check	✅ Passed	The title clearly describes the main change: documenting the release lifecycle in a consumer-facing location. It is specific enough for the changeset, although the wording is slightly awkward.

✨ Finishing Touches

🧪 Generate unit tests (beta)

• Create PR with unit tests
• Commit unit tests in branch 2026-09-16-document-release-lifecycle

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Actionable comments posted: 1

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Inline comments:
In `@README.md`:
- Around line 269-272: Update the README permissions guidance around the caller
workflow examples to qualify omitted permissions: it is valid only when
repository defaults already provide contents: write and actions: read, plus
id-token: write for the npm lane. State that callers declaring a permissions
block must include every grant used by rainix-autopublish.yaml, since the called
workflow cannot elevate the caller token.

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