release.yml fired on every push to main, so the trigger was "a PR was
merged" and nothing else decided. That is a version per unit of *work*
rather than per *shipment*: eight releases in twenty-two hours, v0.0.1
through v0.3.1, for one session -- each fanning out to four publishers on
a runner with capacity 1, so roughly forty packaging jobs shipped three
issues while ordinary PR CI queued behind them. pacman, Homebrew and
Obtainium see every one.
The push trigger is gone and workflow_dispatch, which was already there
and already worked, is the whole mechanism. Nothing else had to change to
batch releases, because semantic-release already reads every commit since
the last tag: five fixes and two feats become one minor release with all
seven in the notes. Release frequency was only ever how often this file
fired.
This is the rule index-artifact.yml states and is the other instance of:
a job that mutates state which cannot be rebuilt in ten minutes is
triggered deliberately, not by a push. A release here is a tag, a Gitea
release, an Arch package, a Homebrew formula, a signed APK and desktop
assets -- and an Android version going backwards costs the user their
library.
`dry_run` is what makes a manual trigger usable: the point of pulling a
lever by hand is being able to look first, so the input runs
semantic-release --dry-run -- the version and the notes, no tag, no
release, no publishers. Anything but the literal string "true" releases
for real, because a typo in a dispatch box must not silently turn a
shipment into a green no-op.
Two alternatives were considered and rejected, both recorded on the
issue. A `beta` integration branch relocates the trigger rather than
removing one: it needs a second protected branch carrying the same
required checks, and it *adds* a full check + e2e run per batch on the
very runner whose queue is the complaint. A schedule batches without
anyone having to remember, but puts the decision back on a timer, which
is the thing being removed.
Closes#115
Their trigger is `v*`, which matches `v0.4.0-beta.1`. They guarded
`v0.0.0` -- the version floor -- and nothing else, so the first
prerelease tag would have published a beta everywhere.
Nothing produces one today. The guard is here because the thing that
would is `prerelease: true` in .releaserc.yml, a one-line change whose
blast radius is four public channels and which nothing in those four
files mentions. That is the same argument release.yml's `chore(release):`
guard is kept on: cheap, against something a future edit turns on
somewhere else entirely.
android-apk is the worst of the four twice over. Its APK goes to the
*generic* registry, which is readable without credentials so Obtainium
can poll a plain URL, so a beta would be offered to every device on it.
And its versionCode maths splits on dots: it would read "1" out of
"0-beta" and produce a wrong number rather than a failed build, which
matters because Android orders releases by that integer and refuses
anything not greater than what is installed.
Each is a clean skip rather than a failure, matching the v0.0.0 guard
beside it: a red run against a tag that was never meant to ship is noise.
logan