Binary Releases

RSConstruct publishes pre-built binaries as GitHub releases. A release is made with cargo release; CI builds and publishes the binaries from the release commit it pushes.

Supported Platforms

RSConstruct is unix-only. There is no Windows build: the release matrix in .github/workflows/ci.yml has never contained a Windows target, and the codebase assumes unix throughout (flock, /dev/null, $HOME, apt-based tool installation).

How It Works

Everything runs from the single CI workflow (.github/workflows/ci.yml). The workflow triggers on branch pushes only. Every push runs the test job; a push to the default branch whose commit message starts with chore: Release (the commit cargo release makes) also runs three release jobs:

1. build — a matrix job that builds the release binary for each platform and uploads it as a GitHub Actions artifact. It runs only after the test job passes, so a release never ships from a commit whose tests fail.
2. release — waits for all builds to finish, downloads the binary artifacts, and creates a GitHub release named after the version in Cargo.toml (v<version>), with auto-generated release notes and all binaries attached.
3. docs — builds the mdBook documentation and deploys it to GitHub Pages.

Pushing a tag on its own does nothing: cargo release pushes the tag together with the release commit, and the workflow ignores tag pushes so the two do not start two identical runs.

Creating a Release

cargo release patch            # dry run: shows what would happen
cargo release patch --execute  # bump, commit, tag, publish, push

Use minor or major instead of patch for a bigger bump. With --execute, cargo release (configured in release.toml):

1. bumps version in Cargo.toml,
2. commits it as chore: Release rsconstruct version <version>,
3. creates a signed tag v<version>,
4. publishes the crate to crates.io,
5. pushes the commit and the tag.

The push of that commit to the default branch starts the release jobs above. Bumping the version and tagging by hand does not produce a release, because the commit message would not start with chore: Release .

Release Profile

The binary is optimized for size and performance:

[profile.release]
strip = true        # Remove debug symbols
lto = true          # Link-time optimization across all crates
codegen-units = 1   # Single codegen unit for better optimization