Previous scheme conflated "which release is this" with "how many times has
it been rebuilt": every run bumped the patch version, so by the time a build
was ready to promote to master the version number had already crept forward
by however many alpha/beta iterations it took to get there.
Now a release cycle has one fixed target version (e.g. 0.4.1) that stays in
every manifest unchanged through all alpha/beta iterations; only a
per-channel counter increments, and that counter lives ONLY in the git tag,
never in Cargo.toml:
v0.4.1-alpha.1 -> v0.4.1-alpha.2 -> ... -> v0.4.1-alpha.N
v0.4.1-beta.1 -> v0.4.1-beta.2 -> ... -> v0.4.1-beta.N
v0.4.1 <- master, iteration dropped
Deliberately "0.4.1-alpha.N" (dot AFTER the hyphen — a semver pre-release
identifier), not "0.4.1.N-alpha" (a 4th dot component before the hyphen):
the latter isn't valid semver and Cargo's version parser rejects it outright,
so it can never appear in Cargo.toml. That's also why the target version
itself never needs to change on a plain iteration — bumping every manifest +
refreshing both Cargo.locks is now skipped entirely unless -Switch actually
changes the target, making a routine alpha/beta push fast (just the state
file's counter + a tag).
Also fixes a real bug found while touching this: release.yml's push trigger
is tags-only ("v*") with no branch trigger, so the old `git push origin
$branch`-only path for alpha/pre-release never actually started a CI run —
only the master path (which already pushed a tag) worked. Every channel now
always pushes a real tag, which is what actually triggers the build.
release.yml's resolve-channel needed no changes: its tag-channel detection
already does substring matching (*-alpha*/*-beta*), so it classifies
"v0.4.1-alpha.37" correctly without modification.
-Prefix is gone — channel was always 1:1 with -Branch (alpha/pre-release/
master), so it was a redundant, independently-settable axis that could
silently drift from the branch (e.g. -Branch alpha -Prefix beta).
Replaces ad-hoc manual tag pushes (which is how the confusing v0.4.1-beta /
v0.4.2-beta / bare "nightly" / "pre-release" release mess happened) with one
script that always goes through the same path: bump every version manifest,
commit, and push in the way release.yml's resolve-channel job actually
expects (branch push for nightly/pre-release, a real "vX.Y.Z" tag for
master — never a hand-pushed "vX.Y.Z-beta"-style tag).
Remembers the last {version, branch, prefix} used in .release-state.json, so
a bare run repeats last time's channel with the patch version bumped, and
-Switch starts a new version line (e.g. 0.3.x -> 0.4.0) without disturbing
which channel is currently being released to.
ospab