helix-mods/docs/releases.md

Checklist

Helix releases are versioned in the Calendar Versioning scheme: YY.0M(.MICRO), for example, 22.05 for May of 2022, or in a patch release, 22.05.1. In these instructions we'll use <tag> as a placeholder for the tag being published.

• Merge the changelog PR
• Add new <release> entry in contrib/Helix.appdata.xml with release information according to the AppStream spec
• Tag and push
  • git tag -s -m "<tag>" -a <tag> && git push
  • Make sure to switch to master and pull first
• Edit the Cargo.toml file and change the date in the version field to the next planned release
  • Due to Cargo having a strict requirement on SemVer with 3 or more version numbers, a 0 is required in the micro version; however, unless we are publishing a patch release after a major release, the .0 is dropped in the user facing version.
  • Releases are planned to happen every two months, so 22.05.0 would change to 22.07.0
  • If we are pushing a patch/bugfix release in the same month as the previous release, bump the micro version, e.g. 22.07.0 to 22.07.1
• Wait for the Release CI to finish
  • It will automatically turn the git tag into a GitHub release when it uploads artifacts
• Edit the new release
  • Use <tag> as the title
  • Link to the changelog and release notes
• Merge the release notes PR
• Download the macos and linux binaries and update the sha256s in the homebrew formula
  • Use sha256sum on the downloaded .tar.xz files to determine the hash
• Link to the release notes in this-week-in-rust
  • Example PR
• Post to reddit
  • Example post

Changelog Curation

The changelog is currently created manually by reading through commits in the log since the last release. GitHub's compare view is a nice way to approach this. For example, when creating the 22.07 release notes, this compare link may be used

https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/compare/22.05...master

Either side of the triple-dot may be replaced with an exact revision, so if you wish to incrementally compile the changelog, you can tackle a weeks worth or so, record the revision where you stopped, and use that as a starting point next week:

https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/compare/7706a4a0d8b67b943c31d0c5f7b00d357b5d838d...master

A work-in-progress commit for a changelog might look like this example.

Not every PR or commit needs a blurb in the changelog. Each release section tends to have a blurb that links to a GitHub comparison between release versions for convenience:

As usual, the following is a summary of each of the changes since the last release. For the full log, check out the git log.

Typically, small changes like dependencies or documentation updates, refactors, or meta changes like GitHub Actions work are left out.