# GitHub Releases Backfill Debate

## The Question

ytm-player has **20 git tags** (v1.2.2–v1.5.0) but **ZERO GitHub Releases**. 7 of those tags have no changelog entries. How should the Releases tab be populated?

**Options:**
- **A** — Create all 20 releases (use `--generate-notes` for the 7 without changelog entries)
- **B** — Create only the 13 releases that have changelog entries
- **C** — Skip entirely, only do releases going forward
- **D** — Create only v1.5.0 now, start fresh going forward
- **D-mod** — Create v1.0.0 + v1.5.0 only (genesis + current)

**Context:**
- 1 month old project, published on PyPI + AUR + NixOS flake
- 5 external contributors with merged PRs
- Only 4 repo subscribers (watchers)
- Same-day patch bursts: 5 releases on Mar 2, 7 on Mar 5
- Full CHANGELOG.md exists with detailed notes for 13 of 20 tags
- Tags without changelog: v1.2.5, v1.2.6, v1.2.7, v1.2.8, v1.3.2, v1.3.5, v1.4.1

---

## Part 1: The Debate (6 Experts)

---

### Debater 1 — Senior OSS Maintainer | Position: Option D (v1.5.0 only)

Option D is the only rational choice. Here's why the other three are traps.

Option A — backfill all 20 releases — is theater masquerading as diligence. Six of those tags (v1.2.5, v1.2.6, v1.2.7, v1.2.8, v1.3.2, v1.3.5) have zero documented context. Letting GitHub auto-generate release notes for them means GitHub compares commit ranges and dumps raw commit messages — and at this project's age, those messages are going to be things like "fix", "wip", "bump", or partial patches that made no sense in isolation. You're not informing users, you're manufacturing noise with a GitHub badge on it. Worse, you have five patch releases on March 2nd and seven on March 5th. Those aren't releases in any meaningful sense — they're a debugging session committed to git. Retroactively presenting them as 12 distinct GitHub Releases is actively misleading. Users who land on the releases page and see "v1.3.1, v1.3.2, v1.3.3, v1.3.4, v1.3.5, v1.3.6 — all March 5th" will conclude this project is either chaotic or being gamed. Neither impression serves you.

Option B — backfill only the 13 with changelog entries — is a halfway measure that creates its own problem: a releases page with conspicuous gaps. v1.2.5 through v1.2.8 are absent, then v1.2.9 appears, then v1.3.2 and v1.3.5 are gone. Every sophisticated user who notices will ask what was in those missing releases. You can't answer, because you didn't document it. And you're still doing the heavy lifting of creating 13 releases retroactively for a project with 4 watchers. That's hours of maintenance effort for an audience that doesn't exist yet.

Option C — skip it entirely — is the coward's answer. It leaves the project in a genuinely broken state going forward: you have a PyPI package, an AUR package, a NixOS flake, and five external contributors, with no releases page to anchor any of it. When a user files a bug and you ask what version they're on, "v1.4.1" means something on PyPI but nothing on GitHub. That gap will cause real support friction.

Option D solves this cleanly. You pick the most meaningful cut: v1.5.0, the first major refactor, a version with a complete and polished changelog entry, contributor credits, and a clean test suite. You create one authoritative release that sets the standard — proper title, real notes, linked PRs, milestone feel. Then every release from here follows that pattern. The backfill problem evaporates because v1.5.0 acts as the implicit "everything before this" marker.

This is exactly what projects like fd-find, bat, and ripgrep did when they formalized their release process mid-project: one clean anchor, consistent cadence forward. Nobody went back and wondered what happened to the missing tags. The releases page told a coherent story from the point it started being maintained.

**Four watchers means you have one chance to make a first impression on the next forty. Make it v1.5.0, make it excellent, and never look back.**

---

### Debater 2 — Python Packaging Expert | Position: Option B (13 with changelog entries)

Option B is the only defensible choice. Here's why the others fail.

Option A sounds thorough until you think about what `--generate-notes` actually produces for those 7 tags. GitHub scrapes commit messages and PR titles. For same-day patch bursts like the five releases on March 2nd and seven on March 5th, you'll get auto-generated noise like "fix stuff" and "bump version" inflated into fake release notes. That's not documentation — it's theater. You're telling future contributors and users "we had releases here" while simultaneously showing them you have nothing meaningful to say about them. The result is worse than silence: it actively erodes trust in the changelog as a source of truth. pip's changelog has never done this. requests has never done this. When projects backfill with garbage auto-notes, it signals cargo-cult maintainership.

Option C — skipping the backfill entirely — abandons the 5 external contributors who already merged PRs into those 13 documented releases. Those people deserve a release record that shows their work shipped. A GitHub Release is how contributors get recognition beyond a commit SHA buried in git log. Skipping it entirely also means the GitHub Releases page stays empty, which is a credibility signal to prospective users evaluating whether this project is actively maintained. "No releases" reads as "toy project" to anyone evaluating ytm-player on GitHub for the first time.

Option D — only v1.5.0 — has the same contributor problem as C, plus it creates a deceptive history gap. You'll have 19 tags with no releases, then suddenly a v1.5.0 release. Anyone who installs from PyPI and wonders "what changed since v1.3.0?" has nowhere to look. The Releases tab exists specifically to answer that question. Leaving it half-empty doesn't start fresh — it starts broken.

Option B threads the needle correctly. The 13 releases with CHANGELOG.md entries represent real, curated documentation decisions you already made. Backfilling exactly those 13 entries respects that signal: if it was worth writing changelog prose for, it's worth a GitHub Release. If it wasn't worth writing changelog prose for — the same-day hotfix patches — then it's not worth a GitHub Release either. Those 7 undocumented tags can live as lightweight git tags. That's what lightweight tags are for.

This is also consistent with how mature PyPI projects handle versioning debt. Django, Flask, Celery — when they reorganized their changelogs after the fact, they documented what they had and left gaps where documentation didn't exist. They didn't fabricate notes for releases they couldn't speak to honestly.

The 4 repo subscribers won't notice the 7 missing releases. They will notice if the releases you do create are filled with machine-generated garbage that contradicts the CHANGELOG.md sitting right there in the repo root.

**Create the 13. Skip the 7. Document what you know, leave honest gaps for what you don't. Anything else is noise pretending to be signal.**

---

### Debater 3 — GitHub Community & Growth Expert | Position: Option A (all 20)

The case for all 20 releases, no exceptions.

Let me tell you exactly why Options B, C, and D are lazy compromises that will actively hurt this project's growth, and why Option A is the only defensible choice.

Option D is the worst idea on the table. "Start fresh" sounds clean in theory. In practice, you're telling every person who discovers ytm-player through PyPI, AUR, or a blog post and then clicks "Releases" on GitHub: this project shipped 19 versions and didn't think any of them were worth documenting. That's not a clean slate — that's a graveyard of unanswered questions. Newcomers use the releases page to evaluate project velocity and stability. A gap from 0 to v1.5.0 with nothing in between reads as abandoned history, not fresh start.

Option C is identical to D but with extra self-deception. "We'll do it right going forward" is the software equivalent of "I'll start the diet Monday." The history still exists. The tags still exist. Every `git tag -l` output, every PyPI page, every AUR package history tells a story that your Releases page contradicts. Gaps signal negligence, not intentional minimalism.

Option B is almost right but betrays the 7 skipped versions in the worst possible way. If you create releases for 13 tags and skip 7, you're creating a puzzle for users and contributors. Why does v1.2.4 have notes but v1.2.5 doesn't? What happened in those patch bursts on March 2nd and March 5th? The silence is louder than `--generate-notes` would be. GitHub's auto-generated notes are not empty — they pull commit messages and pull request titles. That's real signal. It tells users "this patch fixed X commits worth of work." It's honest.

Option A is what the successful TUI projects actually do. Look at lazygit — every patch release has a release, including ones that just say "minor fixes." Look at yazi — same pattern. Look at btop — they've backfilled releases across version gaps when the project gained traction. None of them skipped patch versions to look "cleaner." They understood that completeness signals professionalism, and professionalism attracts contributors.

Here's the concrete growth argument: GitHub's "Releases" RSS feed is how power users and tool aggregators like Terminal Trove, Awesome-TUI, and various "this week in CLI tools" newsletters discover and track projects. If your releases page shows only v1.5.0, aggregators that check release cadence see a project that ships once. If it shows 20 releases in one month, they see a project on fire. That velocity is a recruiting signal for contributors.

The 5 external contributors you already have — @gitiy1, @hanandewa5, @firedev, @Thayrov, @glywil — deserve to have their merged work documented in the release that shipped it. Skipping those releases erases their contribution from the most visible part of the repo.

**Fill the gaps. All 20. A project that ships 20 versions in a month and documents none of them doesn't deserve the stars it's asking for.**

---

### Debater 4 — DevRel/Growth Lead | Position: Modified D (v1.0.0 + v1.5.0)

Modified D: Two releases. Genesis and now. Everything else is noise.

**Option A is a confession of chaos.** Backfilling all 20 releases, including 7 with no changelog, is the worst thing you can do to a first-time visitor. GitHub Releases is not a git log. It's a *story*. What story does a visitor read when they land and see "v1.2.5 — no description" followed by "v1.2.6 — no description" followed by "v1.2.7 — no description"? They read: *this project is disorganized*. The `--generate-notes` flag will generate commit noise like "fix typo" and "oops" into official release notes. That's not transparency. That's laundry. You burn trust before they clone the repo. Kubernetes doesn't show you every internal RC. Neovim doesn't apologize for every patch burst. You curate.

**Option B is half-measures theater.** "Only the 13 with changelog entries" sounds responsible but it's still 13 releases, many of which are same-day patches from early turbulent weeks. The five-releases-on-March-2 and seven-on-March-5 story *still shows up* in the release list. You've just made it slightly less embarrassing. Visitors will still scroll through patch after patch asking "why is this project so volatile?" You haven't fixed the impression — you've just trimmed the worst offenders while leaving the skeleton exposed.

**Option C is giving up.** Nothing says "we never thought about distribution" like zero releases on a project with 20 tags and PyPI publication. First-time visitors check GitHub Releases. It's muscle memory. An empty releases tab on a month-old project with external contributors and three distribution channels is a red flag, full stop. "Going forward only" means your first release ever is v1.6.0 or whatever comes next — with no context, no arc, no story. You've abandoned the narrative before it started.

**Modified D is the only choice with actual marketing sense.** v1.0.0 is your origin story. It anchors the project's birth. Even if you're backfilling, it signals: "here's where we started." v1.5.0 is your current state — stable, multi-platform, 370 tests, 5 external contributors, PyPI + AUR + NixOS. That's a compelling leap in one month. The gap *between* those two releases tells a better story than 18 intermediate releases ever could: this project moved fast, matured fast, and is now ready for you. Look at how Signal, Bruno, or Zed handle their public presence. They don't dump every internal iteration on users. They show inflection points.

Two releases. A clear before and after. No noise, no apology, no patch-burst artifacts.

**You're not hiding history — you're telling a story. And stories have a beginning and a present, not a transcript.**

---

### Debater 5 — End User Advocate | Position: Option C (skip entirely)

Option C: Skip it. Seriously.

Let's cut through the process theater here and talk about what actually matters to the people using this tool.

Nobody installing ytm-player from PyPI, AUR, or a NixOS flake has ever once opened the GitHub Releases tab to decide whether to trust a project. Zero. That's not how terminal app users behave. They run `pip install ytm-player`, check if it plays music, and move on. The release page is not the product. The TUI is the product.

**The case for A and B is fundamentally dishonest.** Retroactively creating 20 releases — or even 13 — is historical revisionism dressed up as documentation. Those releases didn't have announcements. No one was notified. The changelogs for 6 of those tags don't even exist. So what are you actually creating? Fabricated timestamps and reconstructed blurbs for events that happened weeks ago, attached to a release mechanism that delivers no value to users who already installed via their package manager of choice. You're spending real hours manufacturing the appearance of process for an audience of four repo watchers. That's not engineering — that's cargo culting.

And creating releases with known gaps (Option B) is worse than doing nothing. Sophisticated users — the exact demographic using a terminal YouTube Music client — will immediately notice that v1.2.5 through v1.2.8 and v1.3.2 and v1.3.5 are just... missing. Now instead of "no releases," you've communicated "the maintainer sometimes doesn't document things and also went through a very chaotic patch burst period." You've traded a clean slate for visible inconsistency.

**Option D is the half-measure that buys you nothing.** Creating only v1.5.0 makes the release page look like you just started the project last week. It strips all context, signals nothing about the project's trajectory, and still requires you to write release notes — except now you're doing it for one release instead of zero, gaining all the maintenance overhead and none of the historical value.

**What Option C actually gives you:** Starting clean from the next version means every future release is properly documented from the moment it exists, with real context, real timing, and real notifications to actual subscribers. It means your CHANGELOG.md — which already exists and works — does the retroactive documentation job it was built to do. It means you spend the next hour shipping a feature instead of writing fake release notes for a v1.2.7 that nobody is waiting on.

The CHANGELOG is there. PyPI has the version history. AUR has the pkgver trail. The git log tells the full story. The information exists. It just doesn't live in a GitHub Release box, and that's fine.

Five external contributors merged their PRs without releases. The project grew without releases. It got onto PyPI and AUR and a NixOS flake without releases.

**The project does not need releases to have happened. It needs releases to keep happening. Start there.**

---

### Debater 6 — Release Engineer | Position: Option A (via draft→publish workflow)

The case for Option A, and why the others are engineering debt in disguise.

Let me start with what the real problem is here: you don't have a release pipeline. The missing GitHub Releases aren't a cosmetic issue — they're a symptom of an ad-hoc process. Every option except A perpetuates that ad-hoc process in some form.

**Option B (only tagged releases with changelog entries) sounds pragmatic. It isn't.** You're making a judgment call — "these 6 tags don't count" — and baking that judgment into your release history permanently. Six tags with no changelog entries is a data quality problem, not a reason to pretend those versions didn't ship. v1.2.5 through v1.2.8 went out. People may have installed them from AUR. PyPI has records. Your release history should reflect reality, not a curated version of it. Skipping them because the docs are thin is backwards: you fix the docs, then you publish.

**Option C (skip, start fresh) is engineering negligence dressed up as pragmatism.** "We'll just do it going forward" is what teams say right before they don't do it going forward either. You have 20 tags with zero releases. What's your confidence level that forward discipline holds without a forcing function? The backfill IS the forcing function. It's the thing that makes you set up the automation properly, because you have to go through the pain of doing it manually once. Pain is motivating. Skipping the pain means skipping the lesson.

**Option D (just v1.5.0) is the worst of all worlds.** You now have a gap in history from v1.2.2 to v1.4.1 that will never get filled, because once you've "started," the motivation to backfill evaporates. Anyone who comes to the repo, looks at Releases, and sees only v1.5.0 is going to wonder what the hell happened before that. It's also a lie by omission — you shipped 19 prior versions. Own them.

**Option A, via draft-then-publish, eliminates every objection.** The draft workflow costs you nothing in terms of subscriber noise — four watchers see zero notifications until you publish. You create all 20 as drafts with `gh release create --draft --generate-notes`, then spend 30 minutes filling in the thin ones from git log. The 6 sparse versions? A one-liner commit summary is better than silence. You review the full set, you publish. Done.

But here's what actually matters: the moment you've done this manually once, you know exactly what a GitHub Actions release workflow needs to do. You write the action. From that point forward, pushing a tag triggers a draft release automatically. You review, publish. No more gaps, no more debt, no more "we'll do it later."

The backfill isn't the goal. The automated pipeline is the goal. The backfill is just the prerequisite.

**Do it right, do it once, automate it so you never think about it again. Anything less is just deferring the work.**

---

## Part 2: The Judging Panel (5 Judges)

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### Judge 1 — Pragmatism & Persuasion

**Criteria:** Persuasiveness, Practicality, Logical Consistency, Attacks on Opponents (1-10 each)

| Debater | Position | Persuasive | Practical | Consistent | Attacks | Total |
|---------|----------|:----------:|:---------:|:----------:|:-------:|:-----:|
| D1 — OSS Maintainer | D: v1.5.0 only | 6 | 9 | 6 | 7 | **28** |
| D2 — Python Packaging | B: 13 w/ prose | 7 | 6 | 7 | 6 | **26** |
| D3 — GitHub Community | A: all 20 | 4 | 5 | 4 | 6 | **19** |
| D4 — DevRel/Growth | D-mod: v1.0.0+v1.5.0 | 7 | 8 | 5 | 7 | **27** |
| D5 — End User | C: skip entirely | 5 | 10 | 6 | 5 | **26** |
| D6 — Release Engineer | A: via drafts | 8 | 5 | 7 | 8 | **28** |

**Winner: Tie — D1 (OSS Maintainer) and D6 (Release Engineer) at 28**

> "The tie is meaningful: they're arguing orthogonal things. D1 answers 'what to backfill' (just v1.5.0), D6 answers 'how to approach the problem' (fix the pipeline, then backfill). They're actually compatible."

> Key observations:
> - D4 (Modified D) would have won if v1.0.0 actually existed as a tag. It doesn't — tags start at v1.2.2. Fatal factual error.
> - D3 (all 20) lost on the merits — seven same-day release pages is not "a project on fire," it communicates chaos.
> - D6's sharpest line: "Option C: 'we'll do it going forward' is what teams say before they don't."

---

### Judge 2 — User Impact

**Criteria:** User Benefit, First Impression, Contributor Recognition, Long-term Sustainability (1-10 each)

| Debater | Position | User Benefit | First Impression | Contributors | Long-term | Total |
|---------|----------|:------------:|:----------------:|:------------:|:---------:|:-----:|
| D1 — OSS Maintainer | D: v1.5.0 only | 4 | 7 | 2 | 6 | **19** |
| D2 — Python Packaging | B: 13 w/ prose | 7 | 7 | 8 | 8 | **30** |
| D3 — GitHub Community | A: all 20 | 5 | 6 | 8 | 5 | **24** |
| D4 — DevRel/Growth | D-mod: v1.0.0+v1.5.0 | 3 | 7 | 1 | 4 | **15** |
| D5 — End User | C: skip entirely | 4 | 2 | 3 | 3 | **12** |
| D6 — Release Engineer | A: via drafts | 6 | 6 | 8 | 9 | **29** |

**Winner: D2 — Python Packaging (Option B) at 30**

> "The deciding factor is discipline over completeness. The early v1.2.x patches were iterative fixes to bugs introduced in the same session — they don't represent stable user-facing states. Releasing them retroactively just creates noise entries that dilute the signal."
>
> D4 (Modified D) scored 1/10 on contributor recognition: "Six external contributors. Zero appear in any release. That's actively hostile to future contribution."

---

### Judge 3 — Devil's Advocate (Harshest Scoring)

**Criteria:** Honesty, Evidence Quality, Survives Best Counterargument, Risk Assessment (1-10 each)

| Debater | Position | Honesty | Evidence | Survives Attack | Risk | Total |
|---------|----------|:-------:|:--------:|:---------------:|:----:|:-----:|
| D1 — OSS Maintainer | D: v1.5.0 only | 4 | 3 | 3 | 5 | **15** |
| D2 — Python Packaging | B: 13 w/ prose | 7 | 6 | 6 | 7 | **26** |
| D3 — GitHub Community | A: all 20 | 5 | 4 | 4 | 4 | **17** |
| D4 — DevRel/Growth | D-mod: v1.0.0+v1.5.0 | 4 | 2 | 2 | 3 | **11** |
| D5 — End User | C: skip entirely | 8 | 7 | 5 | 8 | **28** |
| D6 — Release Engineer | A: via drafts | 3 | 2 | 2 | 4 | **11** |

**Winner: D5 — End User (Option C) at 28**

> "Not because 'skip entirely' is the correct answer, but because it's the most intellectually honest argument in the room. It correctly identifies that CHANGELOG.md already serves the primary purpose, that solo maintainer time has real cost, and it doesn't dress up a completionist impulse as principle."
>
> D6 (Release Engineer) scored lowest: "The premise that backfill is prerequisite for automation is simply wrong. The automation argument is a justification added to make Option A look principled rather than completionist."
>
> D4 (DevRel) also scored 11: "Signal, Bruno, and Zed are products with marketing teams and investor communications. Comparing them to a solo-dev TUI is embarrassing."

---

### Judge 4 — ROI / Effort-to-Value

**Criteria:** Effort Required (10=trivial), Immediate Value, Future Value, Opportunity Cost (10=no cost) (1-10 each)

| Debater | Position | Effort | Immediate | Future | Opp Cost | Total |
|---------|----------|:------:|:---------:|:------:|:--------:|:-----:|
| D1 — OSS Maintainer | D: v1.5.0 only | 9 | 5 | 6 | 9 | **29** |
| D2 — Python Packaging | B: 13 w/ prose | 5 | 4 | 4 | 5 | **18** |
| D3 — GitHub Community | A: all 20 | 3 | 3 | 5 | 3 | **14** |
| D4 — DevRel/Growth | D-mod: v1.0.0+v1.5.0 | 9 | 6 | 7 | 9 | **31** |
| D5 — End User | C: skip entirely | 10 | 1 | 2 | 10 | **23** |
| D6 — Release Engineer | A: via drafts | 2 | 4 | 8 | 2 | **16** |

**Winner: D4 — DevRel/Growth (Modified D) at 31**

> "The marginal cost of adding one more release over D is ~5 minutes. The marginal value is non-trivial: a narrative anchor, a diff link, and 'v1.0.0 → v1.5.0 in one month' as a story."
>
> D6 (Release Engineer) scored 16: "Automating releases for a 4-subscriber project is premature optimization. Build the Action when releases happen regularly enough to justify it."

---

### Judge 5 — Chief Judge / Tiebreaker

**Criteria:** Argument Quality, Real-world Applicability, Intellectual Honesty, Closing Punch (1-10 each)

| Debater | Position | Quality | Applicability | Honesty | Closing | Total |
|---------|----------|:-------:|:-------------:|:-------:|:-------:|:-----:|
| D1 — OSS Maintainer | D: v1.5.0 only | 8 | 6 | 8 | 7 | **29** |
| D2 — Python Packaging | B: 13 w/ prose | 9 | 8 | 9 | 8 | **34** |
| D3 — GitHub Community | A: all 20 | 6 | 4 | 5 | 5 | **20** |
| D4 — DevRel/Growth | D-mod: v1.0.0+v1.5.0 | 7 | 7 | 6 | 8 | **28** |
| D5 — End User | C: skip entirely | 7 | 9 | 9 | 9 | **34** |
| D6 — Release Engineer | A: via drafts | 6 | 5 | 6 | 6 | **23** |

**Winner: Tie — D2 (Python Packaging) and D5 (End User) at 34**

**Tiebreaker ruling: D2 (Python Packaging / Option B) wins.**

> "End User's argument is the most intellectually clean position in the debate. 'Don't manufacture history' is correct, and 'start fresh' is honest. But it's also a cop-out. It sidesteps the question rather than answering it."
>
> "Python Packaging's argument does the harder thing: it draws a principled line and holds it. Release what's documented, skip what isn't."
>
> "The deciding factor: **a principled incomplete record beats a principled empty record.** End User's position requires you to act like nothing happened. Python Packaging's position requires you to act like what actually happened. For a project you care about maintaining long-term, honest incompleteness is a better foundation than deliberate omission."

---

## Part 3: Final Scoreboard

### Aggregate Scores (sum of all 5 judges, max 200)

| Rank | Debater | Position | J1 | J2 | J3 | J4 | J5 | **Total** |
|:----:|---------|----------|:--:|:--:|:--:|:--:|:--:|:---------:|
| **1** | **D2 — Python Packaging** | **B: 13 with changelog** | 26 | 30 | 26 | 18 | 34 | **134** |
| 2 | D1 — OSS Maintainer | D: v1.5.0 only | 28 | 19 | 15 | 29 | 29 | **120** |
| 3 | D5 — End User | C: skip entirely | 26 | 12 | 28 | 23 | 34 | **123** |
| 4 | D4 — DevRel/Growth | D-mod: v1.0.0+v1.5.0 | 27 | 15 | 11 | 31 | 28 | **112** |
| 5 | D6 — Release Engineer | A: via drafts | 28 | 29 | 11 | 16 | 23 | **107** |
| 6 | D3 — GitHub Community | A: all 20 | 19 | 24 | 17 | 14 | 20 | **94** |

### Wins per Judge

| Judge | Focus | Winner |
|-------|-------|--------|
| J1 — Pragmatism | Persuasion + Logic | Tie: D1 (v1.5.0) / D6 (A via drafts) |
| J2 — User Impact | Users + Contributors | **D2 (B: 13 with changelog)** |
| J3 — Devil's Advocate | Honesty + Rigor | D5 (C: skip) |
| J4 — ROI | Effort vs. Value | D4 (D-mod: v1.0.0+v1.5.0) |
| J5 — Chief Judge | Overall Quality | **D2 (B: 13 with changelog)** |

### By Option

| Option | Champions | Total Score | Judge Wins |
|--------|-----------|:-----------:|:----------:|
| **B: 13 with changelog** | D2 — Python Packaging | **134** | **2** |
| D: v1.5.0 only | D1 — OSS Maintainer | 120 | 0.5 |
| C: skip entirely | D5 — End User | 123 | 1 |
| D-mod: v1.0.0+v1.5.0 | D4 — DevRel/Growth | 112 | 1 |
| A: all 20 (via drafts) | D6 — Release Engineer | 107 | 0.5 |
| A: all 20 (raw) | D3 — GitHub Community | 94 | 0 |

---

## Verdict

### Winner: Option B — Create the 13 releases that have changelog entries

**The principle:** Release what you documented. Skip what you didn't. Honest gaps beat manufactured completeness.

**Why it won:**
- Highest aggregate score across all 5 judges (134/200)
- Won 2 of 5 judging panels outright (User Impact, Chief Judge)
- Only position that scored above 25 with every single judge — no catastrophic weakness
- The "document what you know" heuristic is principled, defensible, and sustainable as a long-term rule

**What sank the competition:**
- **Option A (all 20)** — Fabricating release notes for 7 undocumented patches was universally seen as "noise pretending to be signal." Scored last place (94).
- **Option D (v1.5.0 only)** — Strong on effort/practicality but crushed on contributor recognition (2/10 from Judge 2). Ignores that the changelog content already exists.
- **Option C (skip)** — Most intellectually honest argument but a cop-out. Leaves the Releases tab empty indefinitely.
- **Modified D (v1.0.0+v1.5.0)** — Best ROI score but fatal flaw: v1.0.0 doesn't exist as a tag. Also scored 1/10 on contributor recognition.
- **Option A via drafts** — Sound process argument but "automate future releases" doesn't require backfilling all 20. Orthogonal concerns conflated.

**Best individual quotes from the debate:**
- *"Document what you know, leave honest gaps for what you don't. Anything else is noise pretending to be signal."* — D2
- *"The project does not need releases to have happened. It needs releases to keep happening."* — D5
- *"'We'll do it going forward' is what teams say right before they don't."* — D6
- *"You're not hiding history — you're telling a story. And stories have a beginning and a present, not a transcript."* — D4
- *"Four watchers means you have one chance to make a first impression on the next forty."* — D1
