Add justfile recipes to help with releasing#2077
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Byron merged 2 commits intoGitoxideLabs:mainfrom Jul 14, 2025
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This adds three recipes to the `justfile`. Two of these recipes trigger the release workflow. 1. `unique-v-tag`, which delegates to a script, looks at tags that point to `HEAD`, reports an error if none, or more than one, of them are named starting with `v`, and otherwise outputs the name of the unique `v*` tag that it found. 2. `run-release-workflow` triggers the `release.yml` workflow for a tag obtained via `unique-v-tag`. By default, it runs it on the `GitoxideLabs/gitoxide` repository. This can be adjusted by setting the `GH_REPO` environment variable, as usual for `gh`. It can also be adjusted by passing an optional argument to the recipe (which takes precedence over `GH_REPO` if set). 3. `roll-release` runs `cargo smart-release`, forwarding its arguments to it, and then runs the `release.yml` workflow via `run-release-workflow`. Because all arguments to `roll-release` are passed to `cargo smart-release`, the repository to run `release.yml` on cannot be specified as an argument to `roll-release`, but `GH_REPO` can still be used to customize it. (Also, since `roll-release` is meant to be used when actually creating releases and publishing them, it's not expected to run on forks nearly as often as the upstream.) See GitoxideLabs#1970.
For now, this makes it so the `workflow_dispatch` event has to be used to run the `release.yml` workflow, except for fake testing releases (tags that end in `-DO-NOT-USE`). As noted in the explanatory comment, the `push` event rarely if ever occurs when tags are pushed to the `GitoxideLabs/gitoxide` repository. It is uncommon for a `gitoxide` crate release to be tagged at a commit that does not also have three or more library crates tagged. But `cargo smart-release` pushes all relevant tags at once, and GitHub Actions currently does not register a `push` event when more than three tags are pushed together. So the `release.yml` workflow is run via `workflow_dispatch` instead. The preceding commit adds `justfile` recipes to make it easier to trigger `release.yml` via `workflow_dispatch`. But this runs the risk that, in the rare case that there are few enough tags pushed for the `push` trigger to work, the workflow might be run more than once for the same release. Therefore, this prevents `push` from ever triggering the workflow for tags representing actual releases. See GitoxideLabs#1970 for some other details. (Allowing `push` to still work in testing makes it easier to test in a fork without risking accidentally triggering the workflow in the upstream repository. So the pattern is narrowed to still allow that, rather than being removed altogether, at least for now.)
Byron
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Thanks a lot for codifying and documenting our current release shortcomings!
Despite its own potential issues, I think it's absolutely worth having nonetheless.
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As described in #1970, the
release.ymlworkflow can rarely (if ever) trigger onpush, becausecargo-smart-releaseusually pushes more than three tags at a time, as used here.This makes two changes:
justfileto make it easier to trigger the workflow viaworkflow_dispatch.pushevent from triggering the workflow except for testing tags, so it's not accidentally triggered twice when using the new recipes.There are substantial further details in the commit messages. I have tested everything in my fork, for various scenarios--for example, here's one of the runs--except I have only slightly tested
roll-release. It may be that something likejust roll-release -ewill usually be sufficient when releasing, I am not sure.I am not sure about the
roll-releaserecipe as currently written. If one were to runjust roll-release, then it would do a dry-run release, but then attempt to run the actual release workflow.cargo smart-releasefor a dry run (even if it would have just one command), with theroll-releaserecipe without passing-e/--execute, to discourage such usage where it would not make sense to trigger the workflow. Maybe theroll-releaserecipe should pass-e/--execute.roll-releasefor a dry-run should not be discouraged: if there is nov*tag atHEAD, then therun-release-workflowrecipe will look for a uniquev*tag via theunique-v-tagrecipe, which will fail, and nogh workflowcommand will be invoked.v*tag at the tip of a branch before runningcargo smart-releasewith the intent that new commits will be created with changelogs and a release will be performed. This seems unlikely, but I don't know of any fundamental reason it could not happen. (For example, a preceding just-completed release of at least one crate could have been yanked due to a SemVer-related problem.) If that happened, then we could wrongly rerunrelease.ymlon av*tag.In view of my uncertainty as to how safe and usable the current design is, I'll wait for a review before merging.
Edit: Clarified and fixed some incorrect wording in the above bullet points.