msd-core/docs/CANARY.md

Canary Stream

The canary dist-tag is GSD's earliest preview channel. It exists so contributors and willing early adopters can exercise in-flight features against the long-lived dev integration branch before they have any expectation of stability.

Stream policy

GSD ships through three npm dist-tags, each fed by exactly one git branch. Streams do not mix.

Branch	dist-tag	Audience	Stability
dev	canary	Contributors, willing early adopters	Best-effort. May regress between cuts. Roll-forward only.
main	next	Maintainers, RC testers	Release-candidate quality. Bug-bar enforced.
main	latest	Everyone else	Production stable. The default npm install target.

dev is the integration branch for in-flight feature work (typically multi-PR vertical slices like the MVP/TDD/UAT track in 1.50.0). When the dev work stabilizes, it promotes to main as an RC train (vX.Y.Z-rc.N published to next), and after the RC train bakes, the same train promotes again to latest.

A canary build NEVER becomes a next build directly, and a next build NEVER becomes a latest build directly — every promotion goes through a fresh tag and a fresh release.

Installing canary

# One-off invocation (npx)
npx @opengsd/gsd-core@canary

# Pin to the canary dist-tag globally
npm install -g @opengsd/gsd-core@canary

# Pin to an exact canary version
npm install -g @opengsd/gsd-core@1.50.0-canary.1

The CC installer's defensive purge rewrites stale config blocks left by older GSD versions, so reinstalling on top of an existing project is safe.

When to install canary

✅ Do install canary when you want to:

• Exercise in-flight planning/execution/verification features early and report findings
• Validate a fix you've contributed to dev is reachable end-to-end
• Help shake out canary-bake items (rough edges that won't ship to next until resolved)

❌ Do NOT install canary on:

• Production projects you depend on for delivery
• A machine where rolling back means recreating GSD state (use a profile or a workspace instead)
• A demo or onboarding setup — pin to @latest so audiences see the stable surface

Rolling back from canary

# Back to the current stable
npm install -g @opengsd/gsd-core@latest

# Or to the next/RC train
npm install -g @opengsd/gsd-core@next

If you have a local project that interacted with canary-only features (for instance, an MVP-mode phase planned by 1.50.0-canary), the planner artifacts in .planning/ remain valid — older GSD versions will just ignore the **Mode:** mvp field on phases.

Reporting issues against canary

File against the issue tracker with the bug template. Include the exact canary version (gsd-core --version reports it) so triage can route the report back into the dev stream rather than the stable stream.

Where to look next

• Active canary release notes: v1.50.0-canary.1 (now in the legacy release-notes archive)
• Stable release notes: CHANGELOG.md
• Stream architecture rationale: discussed across #2727, #2773 (codex schema-break and the resulting promotion bottleneck that motivated explicit stream isolation)