From ff24de8d3b24faf196f0cdd8e42ddadf938eed0e Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Yun Dai <yundai424@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2024 16:49:16 -0700
Subject: [PATCH] Update release guide (#167)

## Summary
<!--- This is a required section; please describe the main purpose of
this proposed code change. --->
conclude some learnings from this release :D
<!---
## Details
This is an optional section; is there anything specific that reviewers
should be aware of?
--->

## Testing Done
<!--- This is a required section; please describe how this change was
tested. --->

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- Hardware Type: <BLANK>
- [ ] run `make test` to ensure correctness
- [ ] run `make checkstyle` to ensure code style
- [ ] run `make test-convergence` to ensure convergence

---------

Co-authored-by: Shao Tang <tangshao28@gmail.com>
---
 CONTRIBUTING.md | 13 ++++++++++---
 1 file changed, 10 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)

diff --git a/CONTRIBUTING.md b/CONTRIBUTING.md
index 8466ebc3..54b780c7 100644
--- a/CONTRIBUTING.md
+++ b/CONTRIBUTING.md
@@ -52,7 +52,14 @@ Fork the repo, copy and paste the successful test logs in the PR and submit the
 
 ## Release (maintainer only)
 
-1. Bump the version in setup.py
+1. Bump the version in setup.py to the desired version (for example, `0.2.0`)
 2. Submit a PR and merge
-3. Create a new release based on the current HEAD
-4. New pip uploading will be triggered upon a new release 
+3. Create a new release based on the current HEAD, tag name using `v<version number>` for example `v0.2.0`. Alternatively, If you want to create release based on a different commit hash, `git tag v0.2.0 <commit hash> && git push origin v0.2.0`, and create release based on this tag
+4. Adding release note: Minimum requirement is to click the `Generate Release Notes` button that will automatically generates 1) changes included, 2) new contributors. It's good to add sections on top to highlight the important changes.
+5. New pip uploading will be triggered upon a new release. NOTE: Both pre-release and official release will trigger the workflow to build wheel and publish to pypi, so please be sure that step 1-3 are followed correctly!
+
+### Notes on version:
+Here we follow the [sematic versioning](https://semver.org/). Denote the version as `major.minor.patch`, we increment:
+- Major version when there is backward incompatible change
+- Minor version when there is new backward-compatible functionaility
+- Patch version for bug fixes