Every push to qa now tags v<version>-rc<N>, N incrementing, before the gates
run. That answers "which build is on qa, and is it the one I tested?" without
anyone having to remember it.
The tag lands whether the run goes green or red, deliberately. A red candidate
needs a name more than a green one does: "rc3 failed release-tests on windows"
is a sentence you can act on, "qa is red" is not. Red on qa is the gate doing
its job — the branch saying this is not production worth yet.
release.yml now excludes v*-rc*. Its trigger was v*, which matches the
candidate tags, so without this every push to qa would have built and PUBLISHED
a GitHub release — including for the candidates that failed.
dev -> qa -> main, across every public repo.
dev is where work lands and is meant to be pushed to often, so ci.yml stays
the fast answer: fmt, clippy, unit tests, leak-guard. qa is the release
candidate, and qa.yml is the claim that a commit is production worth —
release-profile tests on all three platforms, and the Linux cross-target
clippy that the local precommit gate has always run but CI never did.
Release profile matters as its own gate: overflow checks are off, debug_assert
is compiled out, and inlining changes what the optimiser can prove. A test
that only passes in debug never guarded the binary anyone ships.
qa.yml checks siblings out at qa rather than dev. This is not a monorepo, and
a qa run resolving its dependencies from unreleased dev tips would go green on
a combination that is not the one shipping — the exact mismatch the branch
model exists to prevent. ci.yml now tracks whichever branch triggered it for
the same reason, since it also fires on qa.
The consequence is that repos move to qa together, in dependency order. qa is
backfilled from main so an unchanged crate still presents working code to the
crates built on it.
Matthew Jackson