DEV GUIDE

Notes and checklists for repository maintainers. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the general contribution process.

Release Checklist

Run all tests
Make the following changes in a separate branch
Add a ## [x.y.z] - YYYY-MM-DD entry to CHANGELOG.md for the version being released, the release workflow reads this section for the release notes/title and fails if it's missing
Update the footnote links at the bottom of CHANGELOG.md: retarget [Unreleased]'s compare link to start from the new tag, and add a new [x.y.z]: https://github.com/NGWPC/flows2fim/releases/tag/vx.y.z line for the version being released
Update sample/test data, if needed
Update README.md and help docs for commands, if needed

Create and push a semver tag (v*.*.*) from the release-prep branch, to trigger the Release GitHub Actions workflow, which:
- builds release binaries for all platforms
- builds, scans with Trivy, and pushes the multi-arch (amd64/arm64) container image
- generates release notes and title from the CHANGELOG.md entry
- creates the GitHub release as a draft, with all binaries attached
If a workflow run fails partway, just fix the issue and re-run it. The release is created as a draft, so retries under the same tag are safe, nothing is locked until it's published

Review the draft release on GitHub (title, generated notes, attached assets)
If everything looks good, merge release-prep branch into master with a merge commit (not squash or rebase), this keeps the tagged commit in history that the release will point to
Manually click Publish release on the draft in the GitHub UI to finalize it
- This is permanent: GitHub's immutable-releases feature locks the tag and assets once published. The tag can never be reused, even if the release is later deleted