Skip to content

Release Plan

Goals

  • Ship predictable, stable releases with auditable changes.
  • Keep release notes contributor-friendly and operations-focused.
  • Ensure reproducible binaries are generated from tagged commits.

Versioning Strategy

This project follows Semantic Versioning principles.

  • Major (X.0.0): breaking changes to public behavior, tool contracts, or CLI interfaces.
  • Minor (0.Y.0 while pre-1.0): new features, non-breaking architecture improvements.
  • Patch (0.0.Z): bug fixes, docs updates, tests, and low-risk maintenance.

Until 1.0.0, minor version bumps may include limited breaking changes if clearly documented.

Branching and Tagging

  • main is the release branch.
  • Pull requests merge into main only after CI passes.
  • Releases are tagged from main with v*.*.*.

Examples:

  • v0.3.0
  • v0.3.1
  • v0.4.0

Cadence

  • Patch releases: target at least one release every 14 days when Unreleased contains user-visible changes.
  • Patch releases: cut immediately for critical fixes.
  • Minor releases: approximately every 2 to 6 weeks, depending on feature readiness.

Release Checklist

  1. Confirm all required CI jobs are green on main.
  2. Ensure high-priority security findings are triaged.
  3. Update release docs for shipped behavior:
  4. CHANGELOG.md
  5. docs/upgrades.md
  6. README.md
  7. docs/cli-reference.md
  8. docs/tool-reference.md Then verify release notes labels on merged PRs.
  9. Validate core commands locally:
  10. cargo check
  11. cargo test -p core_engine
  12. cargo check -p inference_bridge --features vitis
  13. Create and push an annotated tag: git tag -a vX.Y.Z -m "Release vX.Y.Z" then git push origin vX.Y.Z.
  14. Wait for release workflow completion.
  15. Verify generated GitHub release assets and notes.
  16. Post-release sanity check by running released CLI binary.

Go/No-Go Criteria

Release can proceed when:

  • CI passes on latest main commit.
  • No unresolved critical vulnerabilities in direct dependencies.
  • Release notes and docs (CHANGELOG.md + docs/upgrades.md + user-facing CLI docs) are coherent and accurate.

Release should be blocked when:

  • Regressions are detected in core runtime loop behavior.
  • Security policy checks fail for tooling or dependency chain.
  • Release artifacts are missing or corrupted.

Post-Release Actions

  • Open follow-up issues for deferred work.
  • Refresh roadmap in README.md if priorities changed.
  • Close the completed milestone tracker issue and milestone.
  • Ensure the next milestone tracking issue is open and linked in release notes.

Roadmap Milestones (v0.9.0-v1.4.0)

  • v0.9.0 Live-Mode Convenience First (completed): Delivered one-command live setup, actionable doctor remediation, model-pack lifecycle commands, cross-platform packaging, and live reliability/latency instrumentation.
  • v0.10.0 Runtime Compatibility and E2E Test Coverage (completed): KV-cache live inference (#37), runtime compatibility checks with ~30 deterministic reason codes (#38), E2E live-success test lane (#39), zero-guess setup with structured remediation metadata (#44), and release gate closure (#36). Tracker: #45.
  • v1.0.0 Local API and Web UI MVP: Add local API server endpoints plus baseline web UI workflows with secure local operation.
  • v1.1.0 Workflow Depth and Live Quality: Add policy lifecycle controls, suppressions, and live inference quality controls.
  • v1.2.0 Integrations and Team Mode: Add connector framework plus team-mode scheduling/backup foundations.
  • v1.3.0 Multi-Backend Inference Abstraction (milestone #16, tracking: #46): Define ExecutionProviderBackend trait, provider registry, provider-agnostic config, extract Vitis/CPU backends, provider-aware doctor, CLI --backend flag, and multi-backend test harness.
  • v1.4.0 Concrete Hardware Backends (milestone #17, tracking: #55): DirectML (Windows GPU), CoreML (macOS/Apple Silicon), CUDA/TensorRT (NVIDIA), QNN (Qualcomm Hexagon), non-ONNX formats (GGUF/SafeTensors), and quantization-aware loading.
  • v1.5.0 Concrete Hardware Backends (completed).
  • v1.6.0 Agentic Investigation Engine (completed): ReAct agent loop, task-aware LLM synthesis, temperature-scaled sampling, EP-aware debug logs, session caching, KV-cache prefix reuse.
  • v1.7.0 Live Evaluation Hardening (completed): per-tool timing, LLM reasoning capture, evidence-derived confidence, task-specific synthesis, expanded privilege/persistence checks, tokenizer discovery.
  • v1.7.1 Dependency Bumps (completed): toml 1.1, thiserror 2.0, sha2 0.11, CI actions v6–v8.
  • v1.8.0 Live Evaluation Fixes (completed): KV-cache attention mask fix, ReAct garbage fallback, quantization-aware param estimation, severity recalibration, findings detail, template/tool fixes, EP reporting, syslog-analysis template, enumerate_ssh_keys tool.

Immediate Next Steps

Use this runbook to execute the active next milestone end-to-end.

  1. Create a tracking issue from the Release Checklist template.
  2. Apply labels release and the target milestone label.
  3. Verify quality gates locally:
  4. cargo check
  5. cargo test --workspace
  6. cargo clippy --all-targets -- -D warnings
  7. cargo check -p inference_bridge --features vitis
  8. Verify GitHub Actions CI is green on latest main.
  9. Tag and publish:
  10. git tag -a vX.Y.Z -m "Release vX.Y.Z"
  11. git push origin vX.Y.Z
  12. Confirm Release workflow completed and assets are attached.
  13. Close the milestone and open a follow-on milestone.
  14. Open planning issue for the next milestone scope.

Labels and Milestones

  • Source of truth for labels: .github/labels.yml
  • Label sync workflow: .github/workflows/labels.yml
  • Milestone creation workflow: .github/workflows/milestones.yml

If labels drift, run the Labels workflow manually.