A release
A group of cards of one project, delivered together, with an identity of its own: a name, a scope, a date. On completion each repository involved gets its own tag and its own release on the provider — because each repository keeps its own versioning.Freezing
The moment what a release ships stops changing. Freezing cuts the branch, so from that second there is an answer to “what is in this release” that cannot drift while somebody is testing it. Afterwards, a card joins only through a pick — a deliberate act, one card at a time, rather than whatever happened to be merged since.This is a fact only Tylon has. GitHub has the branch and not the release; a board has the release and not the branch. The thing that cut the branch is the thing that knows what was on it at that second.
A hotfix, and what it owes
Some fixes cannot wait for the queue. A hotfix is cut from the far end of the flow instead of the near one and reaches production directly. Skipping the flow is Git’s to do. What is ours is knowing the fix is not on the branch the next release will be cut from — so the card carries a debt: a back-merge, opened as a pull request, until the fix is where the next release will find it. Without that, the most urgent change your team ever shipped is the one most likely to disappear in the next release.The trunk
What actually went out, and when — and if it was taken back out. Not a status somebody typed. Tylon ran the merge, so it knows; the provider says where the commit is. Joining those two is the reading a release page can be honest about.frozenAt is a promise somebody can act on. One still open is not yet.