Releasing

How a cheatah release is cut. Every rule here exists because its absence once produced a broken release page: v1.9.0-alpha shipped its commit but never its tag, three title formats accumulated across twenty releases, and a stray prerelease flag pinned GitHub's "Latest" badge to an old version.

The one headline, four places

A release has exactly one headline — vX.Y.Z-alpha — <lowercase thesis clause> — and it appears verbatim in four places: the CHANGELOG heading (with the date), the release: commit subject, the annotated tag subject, and the GitHub release title. The CHANGELOG heading is the source of truth; everything else copies it. No cheatah prefix (the releases page already says whose releases these are), no (experimental) suffix (the -alpha in the version says it).

Flags

Every release is created without the prerelease flag. The maturity signal lives in the version string; the flag's only observed effect has been to strand the "Latest" badge on whichever release accidentally omitted it. With no prereleases, GitHub points "Latest" at the newest release automatically. Pass --latest anyway — determinism beats defaults.

The checklist

1. Land the work, fully gated: scripts/qa_gate.sh green, regenerated artifacts (docs/html/, the hover DB, the README coverage table) committed.

2. The release: commit: CMakeLists.txt VERSION, the CHANGELOG entry, the README status line, standards/biome-standard-<new>.toml (append-only; the previous standard's status flips to supported), pkg-manager/biome.purr's known_standards(), docs/biome.md's pins, and tests/purrc/biome_cli_test.cpp's expected strings. The body argues the semver level in prose.

3. Tag the tip of main with an annotated tag: git tag -a vX.Y.Z-alpha — subject is the headline, body a prose digest of the notes — and park a release branch at the same commit: git branch release/vX.Y.Z-alpha vX.Y.Z-alpha^{commit}. Every release has one; it is where a hotfix for a supported Biome Standard would land without shipping main's in-flight work.

4. One push: git push origin main vX.Y.Z-alpha release/vX.Y.Z-alpha. The pre-push hook runs the full gate, refreshes docs/html/, and archives archive/cheatah-vX.Y.Z-alpha.tar.gz from the staged review/ bundle. If the hook refreshed the site, commit that as docs: publish the regenerated site and push again.

5. The page, in the same session as the push: gh release create vX.Y.Z-alpha --latest --title '<headline>' --notes-file <notes>. Notes follow the established shape: a short thesis, ## sections per area with the measured numbers inline, a hardening section when an audit ran, the Biome Standard pin with its semver argument, and a ## Verification footer quoting the gate.

6. Attach the source bundle: bash scripts/archive_release.sh vX.Y.Z-alpha (it uploads the tarball once the release page exists — the Biome Standard's source-retention guarantee).

7. Prove the standard end to end: bash scripts/test-standard-e2e.sh — an EMPTY directory, every cheatah env var cleared, biome init → biome add every member → CPM fetches each member from GitHub BY THE TAGS JUST PUSHED (real network) → build → a program exercising all five members prints RESULT: PASS and renders a PNG. This is the acceptance test that the standard's tagged combination actually works together; .github/workflows/standard-e2e.yml re-proves it on demand.

A release is not done until the tag resolves on the remote, the page exists, the tarball is attached, and the standard e2e passes — a release: commit alone is not a release.