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GitHub Release Workflow

The release pipeline is defined in .github/workflows/release.yml.

Branch promotion policy​

Draton uses three long-lived branches:

  • dev for active development and frequent integration
  • unstable for release-candidate style validation and broader testing
  • main for code that is already considered stable

The expected promotion path is:

dev -> unstable -> main

Release preparation should follow that flow. main is not the place to discover whether a change is safe; that confidence should already come from validation on dev and unstable.

Trigger​

The workflow runs on:

  • tags matching v0.*
  • tags matching early-*

What it does​

  1. Runs focused Early Preview verification on Linux.
  2. Builds drat, draton-runtime, and draton-lsp in release mode for the supported preview targets:
    • Linux x86_64
    • Linux aarch64
    • macOS x86_64
    • macOS aarch64
    • Windows x86_64
  3. Packages one archive per supported platform.
  4. Verifies each archive with a smoke test:
    • drat --version
    • drat fmt --check
    • drat lint
    • drat task
    • drat build
    • drat lsp initialize
  5. Generates per-archive .sha256 files and a combined SHA256SUMS.txt.
  6. Publishes the GitHub Release and uploads all supported assets plus install scripts.

Archive Layout​

Each shipped Early Preview archive contains:

  • drat or drat.exe
  • the packaged Draton runtime static library
  • an optional bundled llvm/ toolchain directory when scripts/package_release.py is given a local LLVM bundle path
  • LICENSE
  • QUICKSTART.md
  • examples/hello.dt
  • examples/early-preview/hello-app/
  • INSTALL.md
  • EARLY-PREVIEW.md
  • install.sh
  • install.ps1

Native Dependency Strategy​

Releases are built against vendored LLVM 18.1.8 fetched through scripts/vendor_llvm.py, but the shipped drat binaries on verified preview targets do not currently depend on an external LLVM shared library at runtime. The smoke test strips LLVM-specific environment variables from the packaged-artifact run and checks the packaged binary for accidental libLLVM / clang-cpp dynamic dependencies on Linux and macOS.

When the archive includes a bundled llvm/ directory, the smoke test also points DRATON_LLVM_BUNDLE_PREFIX at that packaged toolchain and scrubs common compiler/linker environment overrides before running drat build.

For source-build verification, prefer python3 scripts/vendor_llvm.py print-env --target host over calling the raw bundle llvm-config directly. The script now prepares a repo-local llvm-config shim inside the vendored prefix so llvm-sys can query version and library metadata even when the upstream bundle executable is not runnable on the current Linux host.

The remaining runtime expectation is limited to normal OS libraries:

  • Linux: common system libraries such as libstdc++, libffi, libz, and libtinfo
  • macOS: standard system runtime libraries
  • Windows x86_64: the normal Windows desktop runtime stack

This keeps the preview archives self-contained enough for end users without bundling fragile copies of platform runtime libraries.

Packaging Scripts​

  • scripts/package_release.py
  • scripts/smoke_release.py

Use them locally to sanity-check the release flow before tagging.

Example:

python3 scripts/vendor_llvm.py fetch --target host
eval "$(python3 scripts/vendor_llvm.py print-env --target host)"
cargo build -p drat -p draton-runtime
python3 scripts/package_release.py \
  --binary target/debug/drat \
  --artifact draton-early-linux-x86_64.tar.gz \
  --out-dir dist
python3 scripts/smoke_release.py --archive dist/draton-early-linux-x86_64.tar.gz