bread/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

bread — Reactive automation daemon (breadd) and CLI for Linux desktops.

Part of the bread ecosystem; this repo follows the same branch/release workflow as every other ecosystem product.

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 (see Tracks below) — a real install you can test 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 — install it 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.

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 --workspace
cargo test --release --workspace

Keeping the API docs honest

Documentation.md's Lua API/IPC protocol sections and README's CLI reference are hand-written and have drifted from the actual code before — there's a checked-in registry, api-schema.toml, plus an xtask checker (cargo run -p xtask -- check-docs) that catches it happening again, and it's enforced in CI (dev-release.yml fails the build on any drift).

Whenever you add, rename, or remove a bread.* Lua binding (breadd/src/lua/mod.rs), an IPC method (breadd/src/ipc/mod.rs), or a bread CLI command (bread-cli/src/main.rs):

1. Add/update/remove its entry in api-schema.toml to match.
2. Add/update the corresponding section — a #### bread.<name> heading in Documentation.md for a Lua binding, a row in Documentation.md's IPC Methods table for an IPC method, or a bread <name> line in README.md's "CLI reference" section for a CLI command.
3. Run cargo run -p xtask -- check-docs before committing. It fails with a non-zero exit and a list of exactly what's out of sync — added but undocumented, stale in the schema, or missing a doc line — if api-schema.toml, the code, Documentation.md, and README.md don't all agree. CI runs this too, so anything that slips past a local run still fails the build rather than landing on main.

CI

• dev-release.yml — triggered on push to main.
• rc-release.yml — triggered on any vX.Y.Z-rc.N tag push.
• release.yml — triggered on any other v* tag push, cuts the actual stable release.

All CI runs on a self-hosted runner; nothing runs automatically on plain commits or PRs beyond the track builds above. See bread-ecosystem's 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.