fix: append build info to release notes instead of replacing

[nerdCopter]

AI Generated pull-request

Summary

• The upload-release-assets job's "Update release notes" step ran gh release edit --notes "**Build Information:** $BUILD_INFO", which replaces the entire release body — discarding whatever description was written when the release was created.
• Fetch the existing release body first and append the build-info footer to it instead of overwriting it.
• Found while preparing the v1.0.1 release: this bug never surfaced for v1.0.0 because that release's workflow run failed earlier (crates.io publish conflict + a version-check bug fixed later in feat: Release version 1.0.0 - Production-ready stable release #38/acad028), so the notes-overwrite step never ran.

Test plan

• release.yml YAML is well-formed (reviewed diff manually)
• Verify on the actual v1.0.1 release: after CI completes, confirm the release body still contains the full description with the build-info line appended

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Review details

⚙️ Run configuration

Configuration used: Organization UI

Review profile: CHILL

Plan: Pro

Run ID: bf3259a1-a251-41e7-abad-ff80f33312c9

📥 Commits

Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between eb5f3a5 and eff5764.

📒 Files selected for processing (1)

• .github/workflows/release.yml

✨ Finishing Touches

🧪 Generate unit tests (beta)

• Create PR with unit tests
• Commit unit tests in branch fix/release-notes-append

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[nerdCopter]

@coderabbitai, AI generated comment

Is this a proper fix? Context: the previous "Update release notes" step ran gh release edit --notes "**Build Information:** $BUILD_INFO", which replaced the entire release body (wiping out the description written at release-creation time). This PR fetches the existing body via gh release view --json body -q .body and appends the build-info footer to it instead of overwriting it.

Please assess whether this approach is sound (e.g. quoting/escaping of $EXISTING_NOTES in the printf/gh release edit invocation, behavior if the body is empty, any edge cases with special characters or multi-line notes).

[coderabbitai]

Tip

For best results, initiate chat on the files or code changes.

🧩 Analysis chain

🏁 Script executed:

#!/bin/bash
set -euo pipefail
fd release.yml
echo "---"
cat -n .github/workflows/release.yml | sed -n '1,400p'

Length of output: 4919

---

🏁 Script executed:

#!/bin/bash
set -euo pipefail
echo '{"body":null}' | jq -r '.body'
echo "---"
echo '{"body":""}' | jq -r '.body'
echo "---"
which gh || true
gh --version || true

Length of output: 432

---

Hi @nerdCopter, this is a solid fix for the core problem, with one edge case worth patching.

What's correct:

• Fetching the existing body first and appending, instead of overwriting, correctly solves the described bug.
• Using printf '%s\n\n---\n**Build Information:** %s' "$EXISTING_NOTES" "$BUILD_INFO" passes both variables as arguments to the %s placeholders rather than interpolating them into the format string itself. This is the safe pattern — it avoids printf format-string injection if either value happened to contain a literal % (e.g., a changelog entry like 50% faster).
• The $(...) command substitution is double-quoted in the --notes "$(...)" invocation, so embedded newlines in multi-line release descriptions are preserved correctly rather than being word-split/collapsed.

One real edge case: if a release has no description at all (i.e., its body is JSON null rather than an empty string), gh release view --json body -q .body returns the literal text null (this is a known jq -r quirk — null values are rendered as the 4-character string "null", confirmed locally: echo '{"body":null}' | jq -r '.body' → null). That means for such a release, the final notes would read:

null

---
**Build Information:** 1.0.1 abcdef1 (2026-07-01)

I'd suggest guarding against this, e.g.:

EXISTING_NOTES=$(gh release view "${{ github.ref_name }}" --repo "${{ github.repository }}" --json body -q '.body // ""')

or equivalently after the fact:

[ "$EXISTING_NOTES" = "null" ] && EXISTING_NOTES=""

A minor cosmetic-only nit: when the existing body is genuinely empty (empty string, not null), the appended notes will start with two blank lines before ---. Not a functional bug, just slightly untidy — not worth blocking on.

Everything else (quoting, multi-line handling, special characters) looks correct as-is.

[resolve]

[nerdCopter]

@coderabbitai, AI generated comment

Addressed: guarded against the null-body edge case in fe57c26 by changing the jq filter to .body // "", so a release with no description won't leak the literal string null into the appended notes.

[coderabbitai]

Tip

For best results, initiate chat on the files or code changes.

🧩 Analysis chain

🏁 Script executed:

#!/bin/bash
set -euo pipefail
fd release.yml
echo "---"
grep -n "EXISTING_NOTES\|body" .github/workflows/release.yml

Length of output: 534

---

@nerdCopter, confirmed — Line 111 now uses -q '.body // ""', which correctly defaults a null body to an empty string, preventing the literal null from leaking into the appended notes. This fully addresses the edge case. Thanks for the quick follow-up!

[resolve]

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