main went from 35ba64ca to a8a4b11f while this branch sat open — 190 more commits,
taking 0.25.0 to 327 since v0.24.0 and making it the largest release so far. That
scale is what forced the restructure.
THE SPLIT. Through v0.24.0 the engineering detail lived in an `## Under the hood
(for developers)` section at the bottom of the notes. It had grown to 21 dense
bullets sitting under the user-facing half — the exact burying the voice rules
exist to prevent, and it would only have got worse here. So:
* `CHANGELOG.md` at the repo root is now the technical half, newest release
first. It opens with a version table that lists every protocol number
INCLUDING the unchanged ones, because "did the driver protocol move?" is the
question an embedder most often needs answered and "no" is a real answer.
Then breaking changes, capability bits, wire planes, env vars, and the rest.
* `docs/releases/vX.Y.Z.md` keeps a short `## For developers` pointer and
otherwise contains no internal names at all.
* The link targets the file AT THE TAG, not at main. A release's notes are
frozen; a main link would silently start describing a later release.
* README.md and TEMPLATE.md now document this as the ritual rather than
leaving it a one-off, including a new rule 7 requiring the TL;DR.
The notes are SHORTER than before the merge — 83 lines against 108 — while
covering three times as much. That is the point.
TL;DR, six bullets: FFmpeg gone from the desktop clients; AV1 at 4K shipping half
of every frame; HDR/10-bit leaving half the encoder idle; Windows hosts minting
their own audio devices; the controller sweep; and settings silently resetting.
The last bullet points at `## Before you update` rather than restating it.
WHAT I DELIBERATELY DID NOT PROMOTE. #96 (HEVC DPB) and the rav1d half of #97 are
ship-blockers for the NEW decode stack, not live field bugs — verified, `git
ls-tree v0.24.0 -- crates/` has none of pf-vkdecode/pf-bitstream/pf-dxvadec/
pf-vaadec and `dpb_limit` did not exist at the tag. Nobody on a released build
has ever hit them. They are in Fixed and in the changelog, not the TL;DR, which
is reserved for things a reader is living with today. (A memory note claiming
shipped 0.24.x clients carry the HEVC bug was wrong and has been corrected — it
was about to drive a release decision.)
Also kept out of user-facing Fixed: the plugin-UI empty panel (fixes the origin
split from earlier in THIS release, so it folds into that change — but its 47993
firewall consequence IS in `## Before you update`, because an upgraded host keeps
a 47992-only rule and every plugin interface goes blank), and the pad-audio
WASAPI path fix (repairs a Windows build break in never-shipped code).
HONESTY CARRIED FORWARD rather than smoothed. The notes say plainly that the
Android overlay change did not make the stream faster, that nothing is
recoverable from the Windows non-C: settings loss, that Deck HDR still needs
Steam's own display setting, and that VB-CABLE should be left installed. The
changelog's verification section says the FFmpeg-deletion milestone never
executed on a GPU, pf-vaadec has never decoded a frame anywhere, openh264 has
never run on glass, and controller audio has never touched a real DualSense.
Play's "What's new" refreshed and re-fitted: swapped the TV-profiles line for the
safe-area/notch fix, which is visible to every modern phone user. First draft came
out at 525 chars; trimmed to 497/500, verified with android.yml's gate logic.
Re-verified after the merge (Cargo.lock conflicted — took main's and regenerated
the bump): lock diff versions-only 35/35 against origin/main, `cargo metadata
--locked` resolves (39 members; fec-rs, pf-driver-proto, usbip-sim and the newly
vendored cros-codecs keep their own versions), `cargo fmt --all --check` clean in
both workspaces, doc lazy-continuation scanner 0 hits over 579 files, notes body 0
internal-vocabulary hits above `## For developers`.
Wire 2. C ABI 14 -> 17 (15 rumble floor, 16 pad audio, 17 session end reason).
Driver protocol 6 and gamepad channel 3 untouched. host_caps is down to its last
free bit (0x80) and video_caps has been full since 0.23.0 — both now stated in the
changelog rather than left to be rediscovered.
Play does not show an empty "What's new" when the file is missing — it carries
the PREVIOUS release's text onto the new version. So the store listing ends up
describing a build nobody is getting, and nothing surfaces it except reading
the listing. That is the shape of the v0.22.3 notes announcing a feature the
tag never contained, and a soft warning in a log nobody reads does not prevent
it.
The gate runs FIRST in the job, before the ten-minute build: a miss costs a
second and leaves nothing half-published — no build, no assets on the Gitea
release, nothing on Play. It rejects three things: a missing file, a file
byte-identical to another release's (the same bug reached by copy-paste rather
than omission), and an empty or over-500-char one.
Length is checked here as well as in play-upload.py on purpose. The uploader
stays the last line of defence and is the only check android-promote.yml gets,
but it runs at step 9; this catches an unedited TEMPLATE copy at step 1. It
counts CHARACTERS, not bytes — Play's cap is 500 chars and `•` is three bytes
in UTF-8, so a `wc -c` check would have called the 356-char v0.23.0 notes 365
and can reject a legal file.
whatsnew/TEMPLATE.txt gives the file a starting point and says what the gate
does and does not enforce: it cannot tell whether the prose was ever edited, so
a copy that still reads "<The headline change>" ships exactly as written.
Canary stays exempt — no curated notes, and Play reusing text for internal
testers costs nothing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Production access came through on 2026-08-01. Until now a `vX.Y.Z` tag could
only reach `alpha` and someone had to promote it by hand in the Console; it now
goes to `production` at 100% (`completed`). Canary is unchanged on `internal`,
and its run-number versionCodes always outrank production, so testers keep
getting the newer build.
A tag therefore reaches real users with no further click. What keeps that
honest: the tag is only pushed once every platform is green, and Play reviews
each production release before it ships. Ramping instead is `--status
inProgress --user-fraction 0.2` on the upload step.
Play's "What's new" gets its own file, docs/releases/whatsnew/vX.Y.Z.txt — the
vX.Y.Z.md body is ~34 KB against a 500-char cap, so it cannot be reused. Only
tags have one; canary is a moving target and Play carrying the previous text
over is fine for internal testers. Same freeze rule as the notes: once the tag
exists, the file describes what that versionCode shipped.
android-promote.yml is the lever for everything that is not a fresh tag —
promote a tested build, halt a rollout, or roll production back onto an older
versionCode. It is separate from android.yml because promotion must not
rebuild, and an `if:` on all ten build steps is worse than one small workflow.
dry_run defaults to true, so a mis-typed versionCode validates and deletes the
edit instead of publishing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Release notes were written for the people who build Punktfunk, not the people who use it —
dense with protocol/ABI/type names that confused even technical readers. Rewrite v0.19.0 in a
benefit-first, plain-language voice (New/Improved/Fixed) with all internal terms removed from the
body and every protocol/ABI/embedder detail moved to a single bottom "Under the hood" section.
docs/releases/README.md now codifies this voice as the format spec for all future notes.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Release notes now live in the repo at docs/releases/vX.Y.Z.md, authored during the
version bump (before the tag). ensure_release (gitea-release.sh + .ps1 twin) seeds the
Gitea release body from that file in the create POST, so the release is born WITH its
notes instead of being created empty and PATCHed afterward. canary/rc have no file ->
empty body, unchanged.
New manual `announce` workflow (workflow_dispatch, tag input) re-syncs the notes file
over the live release and posts a violet embed (title, notes lead-in, release-page link)
to the Discord #releases channel via the DISCORD_RELEASE_WEBHOOK secret. Stable-only:
a -rc tag is refused unless allow_prerelease=true. Pressing "go" is the quality gate, so
a half-built or failed release is never announced.
docs/releases/README.md documents the ritual; TEMPLATE.md is the skeleton.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
enricobuehler
