References: Releases and tags

Primary sources

Pro Git by Scott Chacon and Ben Straub. Chapter 2 section 2.6 (Tagging) covers the canonical treatment of tags. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 3.0 Unported.

Read online at git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Basics-Tagging.

Semantic Versioning Specification at semver.org. The canonical reference for the MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH convention. About 1,500 words; worth reading once and referring to forever.

Git documentation on tags at git-scm.com/docs/git-tag. The authoritative reference for every flag.

Secondary sources

GitHub Docs, About releases at docs.github.com/en/repositories/releasing-projects-on-github/about-releases. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Covers the GitHub Releases UI and auto-generated release notes.

GitHub Docs, Automatically generated release notes at docs.github.com/en/repositories/releasing-projects-on-github/automatically-generated-release-notes. The setup for .github/release.yml and the auto-generation feature.

Atlassian Git Tutorials, Git tag at atlassian.com/git/tutorials/inspecting-a-repository/git-tag. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia.

Further reading

On automated release pipelines: release-please (Google’s auto-release tool) and semantic-release are the two most popular. Both read commit messages (Conventional Commits format) and automate the entire release process. Worth exploring for teams releasing frequently.

On Conventional Commits: conventionalcommits.org, the structured commit message format that pairs naturally with automated releases. Covered in L3 as well.

On writing good release notes: several open-source projects have well-regarded release notes worth studying. Astro (astro.build/blog), Vue (vuejs.org/about/releases), and most large-project release notes on GitHub are good models.

On GPG-signed tags: for security-sensitive releases, you can sign tags with GPG to prove authorship. Pro Git Chapter 7 section 7.4 covers it. Beyond T7 scope but worth knowing exists.

What this lesson does not cite

L10 does not cite specific package-manager publishing flows (npm publish, pypi upload, cargo publish, etc.). Each has its own docs; the underlying git tag is what we cover.

L10 also does not cite specific CI/CD platforms (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Circle CI). Tags trigger these systems; their docs cover the trigger mechanics.

License of this lesson

This lesson is part of the Clawdemy curriculum, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial Share Alike 4.0 International. Pro Git’s CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license and Clawdemy’s CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license are directly aligned (the 4.0 license is an approved compatible adaptation license for 3.0 source material per the 3.0 license’s later-versions provision). Commercial use is licensed separately at /legal/licensing.