ADR-D29: Release pipeline¶

Status:: Accepted
Date:: 2026-05-05
Decided:: 2026-05-06 (user confirmation)
Phase:: F-OPS
Gate:: opens at F-OPS entry

Context¶

Seven repos need an independent SemVer release cadence. Releasing one repo alone cannot break another; cross-repo integration testing on tag is required. protea-contracts is the most disruptive: bumps ripple through all consumers.

Decision (recommended)¶

Per-repo SemVer plus cross-repo integration test on tag:

A SemVer tag (vX.Y.Z) in any repo dispatches a build, image push (D27), and integration test that pulls the new image plus the pinned versions of the other six and runs a smoke pipeline.
Failures block image promotion; the tag remains but the image is marked as release-candidate until the integration test passes.
protea-contracts releases trigger a re-pin in all consumers as a follow-up automated PR.

Consequences¶

Tag is the release primitive; PRs are not.
One canonical integration test stack lives in protea-bundle.
Manual rollback is repo-local (revert tag, push fix, retag).

Resolution¶

Accepted with release-please tooling. User confirmation 2026-05-06. The original direction (“semantic-release”) implied python-semantic-release, which push-commits the version bump back to main and bypasses branch protection. Branch protection on main is a hard project rule; we keep the spirit (Conventional Commits driving version + CHANGELOG) but switch to release-please which opens a release PR instead of pushing to main directly.

Version bumps + CHANGELOG generation are driven by Conventional Commits parsed by release-please: feat: → minor, fix: → patch, BREAKING CHANGE: footer or feat!: → major. The commit-message style is already in place from the F2 phase (every commit during F2A.6-real, F2B, D-MIGR-06, Doc-T11 is conventional).

Cross-repo integration test on tag stays as recommended. Per-repo implementation: a release-please.yml GitHub Action + release-please-config.json + .release-please-manifest.json at the repo root. The action keeps a release PR open at all times; when that PR is merged, release-please creates the GitHub Release and tag, which in turn triggers docker.yml (D27) and the cross-repo integration test job.