Minor adjustments to RELEASE.md

[Patel-Raj11]

High Level Overview of Change

Minor adjustments to RELEASE.md. This will soon be revamped with updated release process.

Context of Change

Type of Change

• Bug fix (non-breaking change which fixes an issue)
• New feature (non-breaking change which adds functionality)
• Breaking change (fix or feature that would cause existing functionality to not work as expected)
• Refactor (non-breaking change that only restructures code)
• Tests (You added tests for code that already exists, or your new feature included in this PR)
• Documentation Updates
• Release

Did you update HISTORY.md?

• Yes
• No, this change does not impact library users

Test Plan

[coderabbitai]

Walkthrough

Documentation updates to clarify release processes. CONTRIBUTING.md renames the manual release section and adds a reference to automated releases. RELEASE.md expands guidance with clearer branch examples, detailed beta/stable release workflows, and new post-release communication steps.

Changes

Cohort / File(s)	Summary
Release process documentation CONTRIBUTING.md, RELEASE.md	Restructured release documentation with renamed "Manual Release" section, added automated release reference, expanded branch naming examples, clarified npm package-lock.json update instruction, introduced separate stable and beta release workflow examples, and added post-release notification steps for email and Discord communication

Estimated code review effort

🎯 2 (Simple) | ⏱️ ~10 minutes

• No functional code changes; documentation-only updates
• Straightforward restructuring and clarification of existing guidance
• New examples follow consistent patterns with existing documentation

Possibly related PRs

• Fix: deploy documentation workflow #3101 — Modifies CONTRIBUTING.md and RELEASE.md to add or clarify automated release and documentation workflow references

Suggested reviewers

• kuan121
• pdp2121
• ckniffen

Poem

🐰 Hops through the docs with glee,
Release processes now crystal-clear to see,
Automated flows and manuals aligned,
Beta, stable, examples refined,
Post-release notes hop into place—
Documentation's a happy place! 🎉

Pre-merge checks and finishing touches

❌ Failed checks (1 warning)

Check name	Status	Explanation	Resolution
Docstring Coverage	⚠️ Warning	Docstring coverage is 0.00% which is insufficient. The required threshold is 80.00%.	You can run @coderabbitai generate docstrings to improve docstring coverage.

✅ Passed checks (2 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Title Check	✅ Passed	The PR title "Minor adjustments to RELEASE.md" accurately reflects the primary focus of the changeset, which includes updates to the RELEASE.md file with enhanced examples, workflows, and post-release communication steps. While the title does not mention that CONTRIBUTING.md is also modified (to add a reference to the automated release process), the guidelines acknowledge that titles do not need to cover every detail of the changeset. The title is specific, clear, and refers to a real and substantial part of the changes, meeting the criteria for describing the main change from the developer's perspective.
Description Check	✅ Passed	The PR description follows the required template structure and includes the essential completed sections: a High Level Overview of Change is provided (though brief), the Type of Change is properly marked as "Documentation Updates," and the HISTORY.md consideration is addressed with an appropriate rationale. While the Context of Change and Test Plan sections are left empty, these are reasonably considered non-critical for a documentation-only change. The description is sufficiently complete for a straightforward documentation update, though more context about the rationale for these adjustments would strengthen it.

✨ Finishing touches

🧪 Generate unit tests (beta)

• Create PR with unit tests
• Post copyable unit tests in a comment
• Commit unit tests in branch update-RELEASE-guide

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[coderabbitai]

Actionable comments posted: 0

🧹 Nitpick comments (2)

RELEASE.md (2)

99-107: Post-release communications duplicated across CONTRIBUTING.md and RELEASE.md.

Lines 99–107 in RELEASE.md duplicate the post-release notification steps from CONTRIBUTING.md (lines 276–280). This creates maintenance risk: updates to email templates or Discord messaging in one file may not sync to the other.

Consider consolidating these instructions into a single, shared section that both manual and automated workflows reference, or add callout notes if the workflows intentionally require different communication approaches.

---

124-126: Minor grammar issue in important note.

Line 126 contains a grammatical error: "needs to closed" should be "needs to be closed". Additionally, consider clarifying the timeline for when "this step will be removed"—will it be automatic in a future GitHub update, or is it a planned improvement to the workflow?

- PR created from release branch to main branch needs to closed and reopened for the tests to automatically execute. This won't be needed going forward as this step will be removed.
+ PR created from release branch to main branch needs to be closed and reopened for the tests to automatically execute. This workaround won't be needed in a future release when the workflow is updated.

📜 Review details

Configuration used: Path: .coderabbit.yaml

Review profile: CHILL

Plan: Pro

📥 Commits

Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between 3fb9c94 and 8bb40ec.

📒 Files selected for processing (2)

• CONTRIBUTING.md (2 hunks)
• RELEASE.md (4 hunks)

🧰 Additional context used

🪛 LanguageTool

RELEASE.md

[style] ~99-~99: Consider using “email”.
Context: ...re notifications to Slack. --- ### 6. Send an email to [xrpl-announce](https://groups.google.c...

(SEND_AN_EMAIL)

🔇 Additional comments (6)

CONTRIBUTING.md (1)

223-223: Clear distinction between manual and automated release workflows.

Renaming the section to "Manual Release process + checklist" and adding the cross-reference to RELEASE.md effectively guides contributors to the appropriate release path. This structure is helpful for discoverability.

Also applies to: 282-282

RELEASE.md (5)

13-13: Expanded branch name examples improve clarity.

The additional examples, including the numeric alpha tag format (release-xrpl@5.0.0-alpha.1), provide better guidance for creating properly formatted release branches.

---

21-21: Clear explanation of npm install purpose.

Explicitly stating that npm i updates package-lock.json helps maintainers understand the step's necessity in the release process.

---

31-34: Enhanced dist tag examples with descriptions.

Adding descriptions for each example (stable, pre-release, release candidate) and introducing the rc option provides clearer guidance for release tagging decisions.

---

35-47: Example tables provide concrete field-by-field guidance.

The stable and beta release example tables translate the abstract instructions into concrete examples, which will help maintainers correctly fill in the workflow form fields.

---

49-51: Clarified dual-pause review workflow.

Explicitly mentioning both the security scan review pause and the pre-release approval pause helps reviewers understand they need to verify findings at two distinct checkpoints.

[Patel-Raj11]

This PR is no longer needed once #3131 is merged.