release-promotion-flow

To coordinate versioned releases across Git branches, you need a structured promotion workflow that guides changes from development to preview and main branches while updating versioning artifacts and validating merge order. This ensures release consistency.

Synchronizing version strings in VERSION, CHANGELOG.md, and docs requires validation checks that ensure the version numbers match across all release artifacts before completing a branch promotion. This prevents documentation drift during releases.

The correct merge order for release promotion follows a dev → preview → main sequence. Enforcing this promotion order ensures changes are validated in preview before reaching the main branch, maintaining branch stability and release consistency.

Validating branch promotion workflows involves checking that version strings are synchronized across VERSION, CHANGELOG.md, and docs, and ensuring merge order rules are satisfied. This validation must pass before packaging release artifacts for end users.

Release promotion flow is designed for a dev → preview → main branch workflow. Projects without a preview branch would bypass the intermediate validation stage, which breaks the prescribed promotion sequence and may lead to unvalidated changes reaching main.

Release promotion fails when versions are mismatched because the workflow implements strict checks to ensure version strings are synchronized across VERSION, CHANGELOG.md, and docs/what-is-new.md. Aligning these files resolves the validation error.