bread-ecosystem/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

This repo is a Cargo workspace. Bakery-channel products shipped from here are bakery (the ecosystem package manager) and bread-theme (the shared theming crate). Shared crates that sibling apps pin — not bakery packages of their own — are bread-utils, bread-onnx, bread-screenshots, and bread-capture. Other ecosystem products (bread, breadbar, breadbox, …) live in their own repos under Breadway/ but follow the same workflow described here. The product list is registry/bread-ecosystem.toml.

Branches

There is one long-lived branch: main. All day-to-day work lands here. Every push to main automatically builds and publishes a dev-track build for both products (see Tracks below) — use this to test your change in a real install before cutting anything more formal.

New work — features and bug fixes alike — goes on a short-lived branch:

feature/<short-name>
fix/<issue-number-or-short-name>

Branch off main, open a PR/push back into main when ready. Short-lived branches get deleted on merge — they never accumulate the kind of drift a second long-lived branch does.

The release cycle

There's no separate beta or release branch — "stable" and "beta" are both just tags on main, not branches that need to be kept in sync:

1. Work accumulates on main via feature/x / fix/x branches. Each push auto-publishes a dev build for both bakery and bread-theme — install with bakery track set dev and bakery update --all, then fix anything broken with another push.
2. When you want to stabilize before a real release, tag a release candidate: git tag vX.Y.Z-rc.1 && git push origin vX.Y.Z-rc.1 (push to both remotes). That tag alone triggers a beta-track build — "freezing" is just pausing pushes to main while you test it, not a branch operation. Cut -rc.2, -rc.3, etc. for further fixes.
3. Once an RC has gone without issues, tag the real release: git tag vX.Y.Z && git push origin vX.Y.Z — that's what triggers the signed stable release build.

Note: bakery and bread-theme share the same v* tag pattern (both release-bakery.yml and release-bread-theme.yml trigger on tags: ['v*'], pre-existing behavior this doc isn't changing) — a single tag push builds and publishes a release for both products at once. If you ever need to release one independently of the other, that's a real gap worth fixing in the workflow files themselves, not something to work around by hand.

Tracks, from a user's perspective

bakery track show              # what you're currently on (defaults to stable)
bakery track set dev           # or beta, or stable
bakery update --all            # pull the latest build on your current track

Track	What it is	Published from
stable	The last tagged release	a vX.Y.Z tag
beta	Latest release candidate	a vX.Y.Z-rc.N tag
dev	Bleeding edge	main, on every push

Dev versions are auto-computed (X.Y.Z-dev.<timestamp>+<sha>) from the latest published stable tag, so they always sort as newer than what you have installed — no manual version bumping needed. Beta versions are just the RC tag itself (already valid semver, already sorts below the real release it's a candidate for).

Local development

cargo build --release -p bakery
cargo test --release -p bakery

bakery, bread-theme, bread-utils, bread-onnx, bread-screenshots, and bread-capture are all workspace members. Run the same commands with -p bread-theme --bin bread-theme for that crate, or -p bread-utils --features bread-client for the IPC client.

CI

• dev-bakery.yml / dev-bread-theme.yml — triggered on push to main.
• rc-bakery.yml / rc-bread-theme.yml — triggered on any vX.Y.Z-rc.N tag push.
• release-bakery.yml / release-bread-theme.yml — triggered on any other v* tag push, cuts the actual stable release.
• package.yml — publishes bakery to the [breadway] pacman repo, also tag-triggered.

All CI runs on a self-hosted runner; nothing runs automatically on plain commits or PRs beyond the track builds above. See docs/release-channels.md for the full policy, including how a new product gets wired onto these tracks.

Questions

Open an issue on this repo's Forgejo tracker.