enricobuehler 4c587ef531 docs(release): split the technical half into CHANGELOG.md, and lead with a TL;DR ...

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.

2026-08-07 20:24:08 +02:00

..

releases

docs(release): split the technical half into CHANGELOG.md, and lead with a TL;DR

2026-08-07 20:24:08 +02:00

embedding-the-c-abi.md

feat(host+inject): pen P1 — per-session uinput virtual tablet, HOST_CAP_PEN live

2026-07-23 16:18:31 +02:00