Stage New CI/CD Improvements.

[reactive-firewall]

Release Notes

1. Scope and Goals of PR Stage New CI/CD Improvements

The overarching goal of this pull request, titled “Stage New CI/CD Improvements,” is to modernize and unify the project’s continuous integration and deployment setup. Specifically, it focuses on adding granular workflows, clarifying job dependencies, and ensuring that the entire build, test, and deployment pipeline is traceable and resilient. Beyond CI alone, this PR also refines documentation generation, code quality checks, and project metadata to align with the evolving needs of the multicast library.

Rationale for This Update

Builds on lessons learned from earlier PRs: we apply refined continuous integration practices, explicit environment checks, and an expanded coverage of build/test triggers. A direct impetus was to ensure the repository has specialized workflows for docs, tests, minimal acceptance tests (MATS), labeling, etc., each with explicit job dependencies and commit-status integration.

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2. Summary (by CodeRabbit)

• New Features

  • Introduced multiple Continuous Integration workflows for building, documentation, and testing.
  • Enhanced error handling and validation in multicast configuration management.

• Documentation

  • Updated various module headers and comments for clarity and consistency.
  • Improved docstrings for functions and classes across the codebase.

• Bug Fixes

  • Refined error messages and handling in several modules and test cases.

• Dependencies

  • Updated versions of several dependencies and tools in configuration files.

• Style

  • Standardized comments and documentation formatting throughout the codebase.

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3. Key Changes and File-by-File Highlights

Note

CI/CD changes are not user-facing

New & Updated GitHub Actions Workflows

A) New & Updated GitHub Actions Workflows

• .github/workflows/CI-BUILD.yml

  Establishes a primary BUILD job, a BOOTSTRAP job that runs tests across multiple Python versions, and a BUILD_STATUS job that collates results. This ensures early surface checks and a cohesive summary of build outputs.

• .github/workflows/CI-DOCS.yml

  Implements documentation build and lint steps (especially around Sphinx). Runs on multiple platforms and Python versions, uploading artifacts for further analysis. This clarifies how docs are built and ensures that documentation issues are caught quickly, and caught in way more independent of functional issues.

• .github/workflows/CI-MATs.yml

  Introduces Dedicated GHA for the Minimal Acceptance Tests, triggered upon the successful completion of CI-BUILD. The previous MATS, and the new check_build, and MATS_STATUS jobs, all ensure minimal acceptance tests only run when the build is sufficiently stable, then report a more confident status of acceptable or not.

• .github/workflows/Tests.yml

  Renames the old CI.yml or CI workflow to CI-TESTS. It triggers on the conclusion of CI-MATs, containing coverage, style, integration tests, etc. Each step is conditional on prior success, refining the pipeline sequence.

[!NOTE]
This is a fist step at attempting to reign in the environmental impacts of inefficient CI/CD scheduling. 🌱

• .github/workflows/Labeler.yml

  Updates the labeler action reference to a fixed commit SHA, ensuring consistency and reproducibility. This partial “pinning” was a pattern repeated in other workflows to harden CI/CD from unexpected changes due to external dependencies.

• .github/workflows/bandit.yml, .github/workflows/codeql-analysis.yml, .github/workflows/makefile-lint.yml, .github/workflows/markdown-lint.yml, .github/workflows/yaml-lint.yml

  Each of these is pinned to specific commits for the respective GitHub actions, improving reliability. Error-handling sections see minor improvements to reflect more robust instructions (e.g., refined environment checks, consistent exit statuses).

B) Documentation and Configuration Updates

• README.md / LICENSE.md / Makefile

  Rebrands from “Python Multicast Repo” to “Multicast Python Module” to better communicate the library’s focus. LICENSE clarifications about included files, coverage expansions (2017–2025). Makefile header shift is strictly cosmetic.

• docs/ (including CI.md, conf.py, requirements.txt, utils.py)

  Extensive additions to Sphinx config: new extensions (sphinx_design, linkify), updates to docstring conventions (Google style docstrings), linkcode enhancements, etc. “docs/utils.py” provides functions _validate_git_ref and slugify_header for robust doc generation. “CI.md” now includes badges for coverage, best practices, and multiple lint checks.

• pyproject.toml

  Flake8 configuration appended, controlling line lengths, docstring style, and ignoring certain warnings. (See CEP-7)

C) Package and Build Metadata

• setup.cfg, setup.py

  Updated to version 2.0.3-rc-3. Adds new env module to the package.

• mutlicast/env.py

  Added functions for validating multicast configurations and handling Git references.

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