New Release Workflow

[doitian]

Full workflow details: release-cheatsheet.md

Why This Matters

The CKB project doesn't keep all crates at the same version. Instead, each crate updates independently. This gives us more freedom but makes publishing harder to manage. Since most crates are stable, we can accept this extra work.

To make publishing easier, I tested several tools:

• cargo-smart-release — not works
• cargo-workspaces — good tool, but we wanted more automation

I also thought about using cargo-semver-checks in CI to check for breaking changes and have contributors bump versions. But this would add extra steps for contributors, which we wanted to avoid.

Our Choice: release-plz

release-plz turned out to be the best fit. It's easy to set up and automates most of the work. The changelogs it creates have some extra noise, but they work fine. Plus, contributors can improve them by writing clearer commit messages.

Extra Details

The workflow also uses Trusted Publishing to publish crates from CI automatically, without needing to handle passwords. We also fixed an issue where GitHub's servers didn't have enough disk space to publish CKB's crates.

Root Crate and Binary Packages Release

The root crate and binary packages will follow the original release workflow in a monthly pace, which is also documented in the release cheatsheet.