PR #28 merged after the bump commit was written, so the notes described a release that no longer matched the tree. Merged origin/main and added what it brings: 45 commits since v0.23.0 now, not 39. Four user-facing entries, because eleven defects in one path is not one bullet and the pinning is the headline the field reports have been describing for months ("my bitrate is stuck at 20"): - the 20 Mbps pin itself, with the measured escape (150 Mbps in ~16 s against ~17 minutes) — the number is the point, since the old behaviour was not "slow to climb" but "never arrives" - the five single-window lessons the controller treated as permanent - throughput counted with FEC parity, which rose with the loss it was meant to detect - the silent host re-target, which made a client's first climb a request to go DOWN The Under the hood section gets the whole sweep in one bullet rather than scattering it, and PUNKTFUNK_ABR_MAX_MBPS moves from the probe bullet into it (it now binds at construction, not only on probe-learned ceilings, so it no longer belongs to the probe). Play notes gain an ABR line and now run 459/500 chars; the gate's real logic was re-run against the file, including the byte-identical check. Voice check over everything above "Under the hood" is clean of internal vocabulary. Re-verified after the merge: cargo metadata --locked resolves, cargo fmt --all --check clean, doc lazy-continuation scanner 0 hits. #28 touched no manifest, so the version bump and the versions-only lock diff are untouched. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Release notes
One file per stable release: docs/releases/vX.Y.Z.md. Its contents become the Gitea release
body verbatim and are the source of the Discord #releases announcement.
Why this exists
Releases used to be created by CI with an empty body; the notes were pasted in by hand afterward. That left a window where the release — and anything announcing it — carried no notes. Now the notes are authored before the tag is pushed, as part of the version bump, so the release is born complete and the announcement always has something to say.
The flow
- Write the notes. Add
docs/releases/vX.Y.Z.mdin the same commit (or PR) as the version bump. CopyTEMPLATE.mdand fill it in. This file is the single source of truth for the body. - Tag & push.
git tag -a vX.Y.Z … && git push origin vX.Y.Zfans out to the build workflows. Whichever one wins the create race seeds the release body from this file (scripts/ci/gitea-release.sh→ensure_release, and its PowerShell twin). The release page shows the notes immediately. - Wait for green. Let every platform's CI finish and go green.
- Announce. Dispatch the
announceworkflow (.gitea/workflows/announce.yml) with the tag. It re-asserts this file over the live release (so any late edit wins) and posts an embed to Discord#releases. Pressing "go" is the quality gate — a half-built release is never announced. Stable-only; a-rctag is refused unlessallow_prerelease=true.
Editing the notes after the tag is fine: update this file, then re-run step 4 (or PATCH the body via the API) — the announce step always re-syncs from the file, so the file stays authoritative even across a tag re-point.
Canary / -rc builds have no file here on purpose: they get no curated body and are not
announced.
Google Play "What's new": whatsnew/vX.Y.Z.txt
Play shows its own release notes on the Play Store listing and in the Play Store app, and caps
them at 500 characters per language — the vX.Y.Z.md body is two orders of magnitude too
long, so it gets its own short file: docs/releases/whatsnew/vX.Y.Z.txt.
Write it for a phone/TV user, not a host operator: only what changed in the Android app is
worth their 500 characters. Plain text (Play renders no markdown), one • bullet per line, same
voice rules as below. Copy whatsnew/TEMPLATE.txt.
A vX.Y.Z tag without this file fails the android job before it builds. This is a hard gate,
not a warning, because the failure it prevents is silent: when the file is missing Play does not
show an empty "What's new" — it carries the previous release's text onto the new version, so
the store listing describes a build nobody is getting, and nothing surfaces that but reading the
listing. It is the same shape as the v0.22.3 notes announcing a feature that release never
contained. The gate also rejects a file byte-identical to another release's, which is that bug
reached by copy-paste instead of by omission.
The gate runs first in the job, so a miss costs a second and leaves nothing half-published —
no build, no assets on the Gitea release, nothing on Play. Two more checks sit downstream:
play-upload.py refuses text over the 500-char cap (printing the real count) before it uploads,
because the API only rejects oversized notes at commit, by which point the AAB is already on Play.
Canary is exempt: it has no curated notes, and Play reusing text for internal testers costs nothing.
Same freeze rule as the notes: once the tag exists, this file is the record of what that versionCode shipped.
Voice & format
Write for the people who USE Punktfunk to stream their games and desktops — not for the people who
build it. A non-engineer should finish knowing what's new and whether it affects them; an engineer
should never be confused or forced to decode internals. (See any recent vX.Y.Z.md for the target.)
- Lead with the benefit. Each entry = what the user can now do, what now works, or what stopped going wrong — in their words. Implementation is not the story.
- No internal vocabulary in the body. No protocol/message names, code type names, hex codes or hardware IDs, crate/component names, or API symbols. Translate any essential detail to plain language. Name things users recognize (iPad, Apple Pencil, Steam Deck, Android TV, the Windows sign-in screen) — not subsystems.
- Group as New / Improved / Fixed, each a bold one-line lead-in + a tight plain explanation.
Skimmable. The lead-in text before the first
##is what the Discord announcement shows, so make it a real, plain-language summary. - Be specific and honest — no vague "various improvements"; a reader should know exactly what changed.
- Compatibility line up top, in plain terms: can they update one side at a time? does their existing setup keep working? No version numbers in the lead.
- All protocol / ABI / driver / embedder detail goes in ONE
## Under the hood (for developers)section at the very bottom — the only place internal names and version numbers belong, clearly optional. The old dense engineering style survives only there.
The short annotated-tag message stays separate and short (a headline + a paragraph); it is the tag object's message, not this file.