release-prep

---

name: release-prep description: Reviews and finalizes a release-plz "chore(release): prepare for publishing" PR for the IronRDP workspace. Use this skill whenever the user asks to review, fix, prepare, or finalize a release PR; mentions release-plz, version bumps, CHANGELOG cleanup, or "publishing crates"; or references a PR titled "chore(release): prepare for publishing". Invoke proactively any time work involves auditing or editing CHANGELOG.md / Cargo.toml version fields across multiple crates ahead of publishing to crates.io.

IronRDP release-plz PR review & finalization

release-plz does most of the mechanical work (computing bumps, generating changelog entries from conventional commits, updating dependency version requirements, refreshing Cargo.lock). This skill covers the human-in-the-loop pass that release-plz cannot do automatically: verifying bumps against the public-dependency rule, rewriting per-crate changelog entries, and deduplicating commits that collapse into a single net change.

All fixes go on the release-plz PR branch directly. Do not rewrite history on main for cosmetic changelog reasons; if real source/doc changes are needed, land them on main first and let release-plz regenerate the PR.

The public-dependency propagation rule

A dependency line in Cargo.toml annotated with # public means that the dependency's types appear in this crate's public API surface.

• Breaking change in a # public dependency ⇒ breaking change in the depending crate (minor bump pre-1.0, major bump post-1.0). The downstream changelog must reflect that it is breaking, even if the downstream's own code changes were trivial recompiles.
• A patch-level bump in a # public dependency does not force any bump in downstream crates: workspace Cargo.toml files use "0.7"-style major.minor requirements only, so Cargo's resolver picks the new patch up automatically.
• A dependency without the # public marker is internal. A breaking change in it is just a patch for the depending crate (assuming the public API is unchanged).

Enumerate public-dep edges with grep -n '# public' crates/*/Cargo.toml. The dep's bump kind is visible in the release-plz PR body's "New release" summary.

For each crate in the release, cross-check the proposed bump against (a) its own commits' conventional-commit signals (feat!, BREAKING CHANGE footer, etc.) and (b) the propagation rule above. When the bump is wrong, fix it on the PR branch: edit version = "..." in that crate's Cargo.toml, cascade to the version requirement in any consumer crate's Cargo.toml, and update the version-header line at the top of the corresponding CHANGELOG.md (## [[X.Y.Z](...)] - YYYY-MM-DD, including the vOLD...vNEW compare URL).

Changelog quality pass

release-plz pulls each commit's subject + body into the changelog of every crate touched by that commit. Many IronRDP commits span multiple crates with very different semantics on each side — e.g. a breaking change in ironrdp-pdu that requires a mechanical call-site update in ironrdp-connector. The PDU-flavored description does not belong in the connector's changelog.

For each duplicated entry:

1. Default: rewrite to describe what this crate actually changed, inferred from the diff for this crate in the originating commit. Use git show <sha> -- crates/<this-crate>/ to see only this crate's slice.
2. Fallback: if the change here is genuinely just "recompile against new dep" with nothing more specific to say, replace the entry with a short note such as Update <dep> dependency. There is a real code change (release-plz wouldn't have inserted an entry otherwise — at minimum the dep version requirement moved), so the changelog should still acknowledge it; just don't parrot the upstream description.
3. Preserve the conventional-commit category mapping (Features / Bug Fixes / Documentation / etc.) defined in cliff.toml, but recategorize if the rewritten entry fits a different bucket better.
4. If the rewrite changes a non-breaking entry into a breaking one (or vice versa) because of the public-dep rule, add or remove the [**breaking**] prefix accordingly, and revert the breaking bump which was wrongly applied (minor bump pre-1.0, major bump post-1.0).

Deduplication across the release window

Multiple commits in the release window often collapse into a single net change. Spend real effort on this — a clean changelog is one of the highest-leverage outputs of this pass. Common patterns:

• Revert before release: both entries should be dropped (or, if the revert was partial, replaced with a single entry describing the final state).
• Iteration on an unreleased feature: initial commit introduces feature X, follow-ups tweak its API or behaviour, all within the same release window. Collapse into a single entry describing X as it actually ships.
• Bug fix on an unreleased feature: if the bug only ever existed in the unreleased code, fold the fix into the feature entry.
• Mechanical follow-ups (review feedback, clippy fixes on a feature PR): keep only the feature entry.

When merging entries, preserve every relevant [#NNNN]/commit-SHA link so the historical trail stays navigable. The headline text should describe the final outcome, not the journey.

Format fidelity

CHANGELOG.md content is generated by git-cliff using the template in cliff.toml. When hand-editing, preserve the generated format exactly:

• Section order is controlled by <!-- N --> prefixes in commit_parsers (Security, Features, Improvements, Revert, Bug Fixes, Performance, Documentation, Build, Please Sort). Do not reorder sections, even if the result looks unbalanced.
• Section headings keep the <!-- N --> prefix verbatim (e.g. ### <!-- 1 -->Features). Don't strip it.
• Spacing must match git-cliff's output: one blank line between version headers, sections, and entries; two-space hanging indent for entry bodies. Don't collapse or add blank lines.
• Entry shape is - {breaking?}{Message} ({commit_link}) followed, when there's a body, by a blank line and the indented body. Keep [**breaking**] exactly as rendered.
• Links are reference-style URLs to issues/PRs ([#1234](...)) and commits ([abcdef0123](...)). When merging or rewriting entries, keep these links intact rather than rewriting them by hand.
• Category placement for rewritten entries should still match the commit_parsers mapping in cliff.toml. If a rewrite changes the appropriate category, move the entry into the correct existing section rather than inventing a new one.

Scope of edits

Only these files should be touched on the release-plz PR branch:

• crates/<crate>/CHANGELOG.md — content rewrites, drops, breaking-tag fixes, version-header bumps.
• crates/<crate>/Cargo.toml — version = "..." corrections and cascading version-requirement updates in consumer crates.
• Cargo.lock — regenerated automatically by cargo check after any Cargo.toml version edit (see procedure step 6); never edited by hand.

Do not touch source code, READMEs, MSRV, rust-toolchain.toml, or CI files here. Those belong on main.

Procedure

1. Inspect the PR's changes from the working tree: git --no-pager diff origin/main -- '**/CHANGELOG.md' '**/Cargo.toml' for the substantive deltas, and read the PR body for the "New release" bump table (use gh pr view only if the body isn't already provided in context).
2. Read the PR body's "New release" bump table.
3. Enumerate # public dep edges and cross-check every proposed bump against the propagation rule and the originating commits' conventional-commit signals. Note mismatches.
4. For each crate's CHANGELOG.md section in the diff, classify entries as own change, public-dep ripple, or internal-dep ripple / unrelated. Rewrite or replace per the rules above. Then deduplicate across the release window.
5. Apply any Cargo.toml version corrections from step 3, cascading to consumer crates' version requirements and the corresponding changelog version headers.
6. If you edited any Cargo.toml version, run cargo check --workspace (without --locked, so Cargo.lock can be regenerated) and commit the resulting lock delta. Then run cargo xtask check locks -v, which verifies no lock file is left uncommitted.
7. Push the fixups with conventional-commit-shaped messages (typically chore(release): ...) so they don't pollute the next release window.
8. Summarize the changes and any judgement calls — especially dropped entries and escalated bumps — for the human reviewer.