ci(release): generate notes when the release body is empty - #96
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v1.5.0 and v1.6.0 shipped with an empty body. Both tags were cut from the GitHub "Draft a new release" UI, which publishes the release before the tag push reaches the workflow. The re-run guard added in #76 only asked whether the release existed, so it saw one and skipped note generation. Key the guard off the body instead: a re-run still keeps its notes (the append bug, softprops/action-gh-release#827), while a UI-created release with an empty body now gets them. RELEASE.md says to push the tag from the CLI.
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📝 WalkthroughWalkthroughThe release workflow now checks whether the release body is empty before generating notes. The manual release instructions now require maintainers to push tags from the CLI. ChangesRelease note handling
Estimated code review effort: 2 (Simple) | ~10 minutes Merge Risk: 🟡 Moderate · up to Release lookup failures could cause existing release notes to be rewritten or duplicated, so error handling should be corrected before merge. The release instructions should also accurately distinguish empty from non-empty UI-created releases. 🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 5✅ Passed checks (5 passed)
✨ Finishing Touches🧪 Generate unit tests (beta)
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In @.github/workflows/release.yml:
- Line 175: Update the release lookup command in the release workflow so stderr
is not discarded and lookup failures are not converted to an empty body. Set
new=true only when the lookup confirms a missing release or succeeds with an
empty body; otherwise propagate the error and fail the step, preserving existing
release bodies during updates.
In `@RELEASE.md`:
- Around line 69-70: Update the release documentation around the UI-created
release workflow to state that non-empty release bodies are preserved, while
empty bodies receive generated release notes before binaries are attached. Keep
the existing CLI recommendation unchanged.
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Review follow-up. Keying off the body was still a heuristic on a non-idempotent input: a transient `gh` error read as "no body" and re-armed the append bug, a whitespace-only body read as "has notes", and a deliberately blanked body got repopulated on any re-run. Call the generate-notes API directly and pass the result as `body_path`, so the job writes the same body every time regardless of who created the release. Drops the guard step entirely. RELEASE.md states that the job owns the title and body, and documents the regenerate-against-another-baseline recipe.
Turbootzz
added
bug
1 participant
Problem
The GitHub Releases for
v1.5.0andv1.6.0have an empty body — no patch notes.Both tags were cut from the GitHub "Draft a new release" UI, which publishes the release before the tag push reaches
release.yml:github-actions[bot]TurbootzzTurbootzzThe re-run guard added in #76 only asked does the release exist?. It found one, set
new=false, disabledgenerate_release_notes— so the workflow attached the binaries to an empty body and moved on.Fix
The guard existed because the action's
generate_release_notesappends to an existing body on a re-run (softprops/action-gh-release#827), so the workflow had to guess whether notes were already there. Every version of that guess has failure modes: an existence check misses the UI-created release, a body check flips to duplicate-generate on a transientgherror and treats a whitespace-only body as "has notes".So don't guess. Call the
generate-notesAPI directly and pass the result asbody_path:Same body on every run, regardless of who created the release. The guard step is gone.
Trade-off, now documented: the job owns the title and body, so a description typed by hand is overwritten if the job re-runs.
RELEASE.mdsays to push the tag from the CLI, and carries the recipe for regenerating against a different baseline (the prerelease-baseline caveat).Verified against the live API — the
.github/release.ymlfilter still applies (the release-plz bump PR is excluded from the generated list).Notes
tests/http_client.rs::an_empty_root_store_is_reported_with_the_fixfails locally on macOS (pre-existing onmain, unrelated):rustls-native-certsreads the Security-framework keychain there and ignoresSSL_CERT_FILE/SSL_CERT_DIR, so the root store is never empty. Green on Linux CI.v1.5.0/v1.6.0are backfilled separately with the same API — this fix only stops it recurring.🤖 Generated with Claude Code