Release promotion

Publishing v3 to @latest takes two PRs into release, both titled "Release" and opened by rhinestone-automations. Merging the first publishes nothing.

Before promotion

• Freeze/lock the historical solana branch and reconcile every queued or in-flight publishing run. Its old workflow can otherwise race main for the shared @dev tag.
• Confirm the checked-in local candidate manifest and default x-sdk-version header are 3.0.0-rc.0. It is a local bootstrap identity, not an npm prerelease channel.
• Calculate the Changesets plan from the promotion tree. It must consume the pending v3 changesets once and produce exactly 3.0.0; do not pre-bump the manifest or enable Changesets prerelease mode.
• Run the contract check against the exact release-PR base. The first promotion compares a v2 base with the v3 candidate under declared major changesets. Once the baseline exposes /evm and /solana, select v3 fixtures on both sides and retain strict v3 compatibility for version-only or patch follow-ups. Run the pre-v3 ancestor (1529637ccc2553b28bfcba3adb8bf6ac40285228) separately as the historical v2 migration audit; it does not replace the real baseline check.

Promotion

1. Promotion PR (main → release). The Release workflow opens it after a main push with unreleased changesets publishes @dev. It is usually BEHIND, because the previous chore: release commit exists only on release. The release ruleset requires up-to-date build, test and release-package-contract checks, plus one approving review that any push dismisses.
   • Run gh pr update-branch <n> --repo rhinestonewtf/sdk before asking for approval. It pushes a merge of release into main.
   • Reconfirm the exact Changesets plan after updating the branch, wait for checks, get approval, then merge with a merge commit.
2. Version PR (changeset-release/release → release). Merging the promotion runs changesets/action, which opens or updates this PR with the stable 3.0.0 bump, matching header, changelog, and consumed changesets.
3. Publish. Merging the version PR runs build, unit tests and the full integration suite. It then publishes @latest over OIDC and opens the SDK-reference PR in docs. An npm publish cannot be undone.
   • Confirm with npm view @rhinestone/sdk dist-tags and verify the exact 3.0.0 package/header before handing the reference PR to RHI-8273.

Both PRs need an approving review. Passing checks alone never unblock them. V2 maintenance publishing remains owned by RHI-8326.