The file had accumulated the gamescope-HDR work as it landed — one "New: HDR on the gamescope path" section plus nine Under-the-hood bullets (the gamescope patches, Vulkan 10-bit, the per-codec probe, the NVENC HDR leg, the EFC BT.2020 model, the managed-spawn flag check, the CI wiring). All of it landed AFTERd0889338was tagged: `PUNKTFUNK_GAMESCOPE_HDR` does not exist at v0.21.0 and neither does packaging/gamescope/, verified by content rather than by SHA. The live release body never carried any of it — it was PATCHed from the trimmed file atc4e80fd4and not re-synced since — so this only restores the file to the 7030 bytes users actually see on the release page. That matters because announce.yml's apply_release_notes re-asserts this file over the live body: a re-announce or a tag re-point would have rewritten a shipped release to advertise features it does not contain. The content itself is not lost; it is where it belongs, in v0.22.0.md. 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.
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.