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Release Checklist

This chapter is a pragmatic checklist for documentation and parser changes before a release.

The important release posture is architectural:

  • parc releases source/frontend behavior
  • it does not release binary or Rust-generation policy
  • the tested SourcePackage contract matters more than parser-internal churn

Parser changes

Before releasing parser changes:

  1. confirm the smallest reproducer has a test
  2. confirm the intended flavor coverage is tested
  3. confirm the AST shape change is deliberate
  4. confirm visitor and printer behavior still make sense

Book changes

Before releasing documentation changes:

  1. confirm the affected public behavior is described in the book
  2. confirm unsupported or out-of-scope cases are still documented honestly
  3. confirm examples still match the actual public API names

Error-surface changes

Before releasing changes around errors:

  1. confirm structured fields still provide the needed information
  2. avoid treating formatted strings as the real contract
  3. update the error-surface chapter if the practical behavior changed

Workflow changes

Before releasing changes to the normal integration path:

  1. update the workflow chapter
  2. update the API contract chapter if the preferred boundary changed
  3. update stable-usage guidance if downstream posture should change

Artifact contract changes

Before releasing a SourcePackage shape change:

  1. confirm the changed field meaning is covered by contract-level tests
  2. confirm the consuming workflow examples still describe artifact boundaries
  3. confirm cross-crate composition is still described as tests/examples/harness work, not library coupling

Release gate

parc is ready to release only when:

  • make build passes
  • make test passes
  • the canonical hardening surfaces are still green
    • vendored musl stdint
    • vendored zlib
    • vendored libpng scan
    • OpenSSL public wrapper extraction
    • libcurl public wrapper extraction
    • combined Linux event-loop wrapper extraction
  • deterministic repeated extraction still holds on the canonical large surfaces
  • the book still teaches parc as the source-meaning crate
  • unsupported or partial source behavior is still documented honestly

Final practical rule

If a change would force a downstream PARC consumer to rethink how it parses, traverses, or reports on source, the book should say so explicitly in the same change.