📖 [Docs]: Release management defines durable lifecycle behavior

[Marius Storhaug (MariusStorhaug)]

Release management guidance now defines durable release state, version reservations, phase-aware recovery, manual and release-candidate flows, accumulated changes, announcements, and trust-aware consumer update policies. Maintainers and consumers can also use a focused procedure for intentionally moved owned tags; downstream release propagation remains outside this change.

New: Moved-tag consumer recovery

Consumers of intentionally moving owned aliases can follow the moved-tag procedure to repair stale local tags, configure trusted fetches, verify the result, and understand the local-tag pruning boundary. Exact version tags remain immutable and must never use this recovery path.

Changed: Durable release lifecycle guidance

The release-management capability now records the complete intended lifecycle contract while preserving the existing consolidated MSX structure and vocabulary. It covers frozen release intents, permanent version reservations after build or visibility, phase-aware retries and withdrawals, manual stable releases, dedicated release candidates, full unreleased change ranges, per-destination announcements, target completion, and consumer trust policies.

The design distinguishes behavior already available in shared automation from intended behavior that still requires implementation. Operators should not infer durable recovery, manual stable release creation, dedicated release candidates, alias reconciliation, or announcement journaling from the documentation alone.

Adopting this release

1. No repository configuration, runtime, or release invocation changes are required by this documentation-only update.
2. Maintainers implementing or evaluating release automation should use the numbered requirements and intended-versus-implemented crosswalk in the release-management specification and design.
3. Consumers that intentionally follow an owned moving tag should apply the moved-tag procedure; consumers pinned to exact versions or immutable fingerprints require no action.

Release impact

Field	Value
Effective decision	release:skip, because this pull request changes documentation only and does not publish a versioned runtime artifact.
Semantic effect	No artifact release; the intended release-management contract changes while current implementation behavior remains explicitly identified.
Release/base coordinates	Not applicable; no version, tag, or artifact is produced by this pull request.

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Technical details

Consumer change record

Identifier / surface	Before	After	Applicability / prerequisites	Consumer action	Verification
REL-MGMT-DOC / release-management guidance	Consolidated guidance covered basic merge-driven release decisions, versioning, and publishing targets without a complete durable lifecycle contract.	The contract defines durable intent, reservations, recovery, retirement and withdrawal, manual and RC semantics, accumulated ranges, announcements, consumer policies, target constraints, and implementation status.	Release-automation maintainers, release operators, and consumers of controlled moving aliases.	No immediate runtime edit; use the contract for implementation work and the focused guide when accepting an intentionally moved owned tag.	Generated indexes, internal and cross-repository links, Pester documentation tests, Markdown lint, Zensical build, and patch whitespace checks pass.

Template baseline

Not applicable: this documentation repository does not distribute an integration template for the release-management capability.

Maintainer evidence

• Updated the consolidated capability pages, publishing-target contract, release label guidance, GitHub Actions guidance, generated indexes, and navigation; added one single-function moved-tag guide.
• Preserved MSX configuration and label vocabulary, including .github/release.config.yml, DefaultBump, and release:pre-release.
• Kept src/docs/Capabilities/downstream-release-propagation/** and all downstream-propagation process content unchanged.
• Implementation plan progress: the requested release-management synchronization is complete; explicitly excluded downstream propagation remains outside this pull request.
• Issue convergence sweep: this work was requested directly and does not fully satisfy an additional tracked issue.
• Validation passed: 64 Pester tests across 6 suites; Markdown lint across 128 files with 0 issues; 128-file internal-link scan; 7-link cross-repository scan across 132 files; Zensical site build; and git diff --check.

Changed surface	Standards checked	Framework docs checked	Result
Release-management capability and operator guide	MSX Markdown, specification, documentation model, and contribution guidance	Canonical release specification, lifecycle design, publishing targets, configuration status, and moved-tag guidance	Aligned
Labels, Actions guidance, indexes, and navigation	MSX page structure, link, generated-index, and navigation conventions	Release marker and consumer trust requirements	Aligned

Relevant issues (or links)

Related work

• Updates the Release Management capability.