docs/release.md

RANGE 0.1.0a3 release-candidate contract

This directory is the authoritative source for the RANGE research alpha.

Identity

• Product: RANGE
• Distribution: range-curate
• Import namespace: range_curate
• Version: 0.1.0a3
• Supported runtime: CPython 3.10
• Supported backend: CPU
• License: MIT
• Publication state: not published

The distribution name is descriptive while the product name remains RANGE.

Required artifacts

A candidate build must produce:

• a Linux wheel and a Windows wheel;
• one source distribution;
• bundled taxonomy YAML;
• bundled frozen Unicode tables;
• the native extension;
• LICENSE, README.md, CHANGELOG.md, and CITATION.cff; and
• the app/ Space scaffold, Docker build, offline exporter, and validator in the source distribution.

Required validation

CI is deliberately small and manually invoked. The range-curate-release-candidate workflow has only two jobs:

1. Linux package + Space smoke validates source syntax, the Space scaffold, the Rust dependency lock, wheel/sdist metadata and contents, clean installations, public contracts, README output, the exported Docker context, the running Gradio service, and the named /analyze and /batch endpoints.
2. Windows package smoke validates the native Windows artifact, source distribution, metadata and contents, clean installations, public contracts, PyArrow support, and README output.

The broader parent research project and historical acceleration suites are not package-release gates. They remain available through the separate manual/main-only repository-tests workflow.

Why the workflow is manual

While RANGE remains inside a larger private monorepo, every feature-branch push can otherwise produce duplicate push and pull_request runs. Manual invocation keeps the PR readable and conserves hosted-runner minutes while preserving the checks that matter before publication or final technical sign-off.

Explicit no-publish boundary

The repository contains no PyPI token, trusted-publisher deployment job, release tag, Space creation step, or upload command for this package. CI artifacts are uploaded only to the associated GitHub Actions run for inspection. The Space exporter writes only to a local directory.

Publishing requires a separate, explicit human decision after:

• ownership and license review;
• inspection of both platform artifacts;
• confirmation of the final repository and documentation URLs;
• review of the public Space privacy notice and input limits;
• a clean release commit;
• a version and tag decision; and
• intentional package-index and/or Space deployment workflows added in a later change.

Alpha support boundary

0.1.0a3 makes a narrow claim:

An exact, CPU-first, research-alpha package for traceable financial-news relevance screening against a versioned general-economy taxonomy.

It does not claim complete semantic recall, investment usefulness, universal throughput, Python-version portability beyond 3.10, or paper-grade performance generalization.