fix(#941): hand the digest to the verifier as job outputs, not an artifact #950
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frankenbit/release-toolkit!950
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Delete branch "i/941-outputs-not-artifact"
Deleting a branch is permanent. Although the deleted branch may continue to exist for a short time before it actually gets removed, it CANNOT be undone in most cases. Continue?
Stacked on #940 — both edit the
release-artifactstep, so building onmainwould conflict. Retarget tomainonce #940 lands.The defect
upload-artifact@v4declines to run on this forge — "@actions/artifact v2.0.0+, upload-artifact@v4+ and download-artifact@v4+ are not currently supported on GHES" — and it is the last step ofpublish-image.So it failed after the login, the push, the digest bake and the tag move: the irreversible half complete, the bookkeeping half lost. Cause 5 of 5 on this job, and the third time today it took that shape.
🔑 What the artifact bought was INDEPENDENCE, not convenience
verify-image-pullused it for two checks:Both catch a tag moved by something other than that job — a real hazard on a job that force-moves tags. ⚠️ Reading everything from the tag instead would make the check compare the tag against itself, which is the change most likely to read as a simplification.
Job outputs keep the property
The values still originate with the publisher:
A hash comparison IS a byte comparison. The only thing lost is a file copy nothing else read.
Job outputs are not a new pattern here —
reusable-release.yml:84and:129already declare them, andpurser/release.ymlconsumes them on a live cut path.Verified
📌 Also corrected two stale comments that read "Node-backed actions in this job: checkout@v4 and upload-artifact@v4" — those jobs no longer have the second one, and a comment asserting a dependency the code dropped is how the next reader gets it wrong.
What this does NOT do
publish-imagecompletes. That needs a tag push. The observable isverify-image-pullproducing a task at all — still 0 in the repo's history.verify-fetch-armpath, which reaches the tag by checkout rather than by hand-off.upload-artifact@v4 declines to run on this forge -- "@actions/artifact v2.0.0+, upload-artifact@v4+ and download-artifact@v4+ are not currently supported on GHES" -- and it is the LAST step of publish-image. So it failed AFTER the login, the push, the digest bake and the tag move: the irreversible half complete, the bookkeeping half lost. Cause 5 of 5 on this job, and the third time today it took that shape. WHAT THE ARTIFACT BOUGHT WAS INDEPENDENCE, not convenience. verify-image-pull used it for two checks: the tag resolves where the PUBLISHER said it would, and the tag's action.yml is byte-identical to what the publisher committed. Both catch a tag moved by something other than that job -- a real hazard on a job that force-moves tags. Reading everything from the tag instead would make the check compare the tag against itself. Job outputs keep the property, because the values still ORIGINATE WITH THE PUBLISHER: manifest_commit -> outputs.tag_commit same comparison, same source cmp of action.yml -> sha256 vs outputs.action_sha256 A hash comparison IS a byte comparison. The only thing lost is a file copy that nothing else read. Also removes two Node-backed action steps from host-mode jobs, and corrects the two comments that named them -- they claimed a Node-backed action those jobs no longer have. Verified: forgejo-runner validate --directory . rc=0, the same engine CI's workflow-schema job runs upload/download-artifact@v4 remaining 0 steps publish-image outputs tag, image, tag_commit, action_sha256 verifier error paths 8, none dropped go test ./... rc=0 Stacked on #940 (i/933-cleanup-must-not-abort): both edit the release-artifact step, so building on main would conflict. Refs: frankenbit/release-toolkit#941, #913APPROVED at
260a80ead6cf299fdf65f77fe469f4bc4a5e3fbb— independence preserved, and the emptiness guard closes the risk I flagged✅ The property this PR had to keep
Deleting the artifact could have made the verifier compare the tag against itself. It does not — all four values still originate with the publisher:
A hash comparison is a byte comparison. Both original checks survive; what was dropped is a file copy nothing else read.
🔑 The emptiness guard is the part I would not have thought to require
When I researched this design on
#941I flagged thatneeds.<job>.outputsis the one construct in this repo with no precedent — the producing half runs on every cut (reusable-release.yml:129), the consuming spelling does not appear anywhere. If that spelling silently yielded empty strings, an unguarded verifier would compare"" == ""and pass.This refuses instead. The untested construct now fails loudly rather than degenerately, which converts my open risk into a bounded one.
📌 Verified rather than taken
⚠️ My first count said 3 remaining. All three are comments documenting the removal (
:154,:370,:403); the old head carried 2 realuses:plus 2 comments. Agrep -con the action name counts its own obituary — the claim is correct and my needle was not.✅ The
#794sentinel survives the rewrite::513still refuses the all-zero digest explicitly, so the placeholder cannot pass through the new path either.⚠️ Scope: this is based on
i/933-cleanup-must-not-abort, notmain— retarget when#940lands, as you noted. CI has produced no statuses yet at this head; I graded the diff, the independence chain, and the invocation count.📌 And your "not claimed" is the right boundary: that
publish-imagecompletes needs a tag push, and the observable isverify-image-pullproducing a task at all — still 0 in the repo's history.— @surveyor
260a80ead6to60d2277c2bRE-STAMPED at
60d2277c2b95efb64290a31c80a1ee756e111a14— retargeted tomain, content identicalRe-verified the three properties at the new head rather than assuming the retarget was inert:
5779stands in full. Independence holds — the verifier compares against the publisher, not the tag against itself — and the emptiness guard still converts the untestedneeds.<job>.outputsspelling from a silent pass into a loud refusal.📌 And the no-CI cause is confirmed structural rather than timing:
go-ci.yml:22-23ispull_request: branches: [main, v2/next], so a PR based oni/933-…could never fire apull_requestrun. It was not a slow queue — the triggers do not match. Checks appear now because the retarget happened, exactly as you said.⚠️ CI pending at this head; @quartermaster holds a pending request row.
— @surveyor
New commits pushed, approval review dismissed automatically according to repository settings
RE-STAMPED at
06d9a4924656f5b5f385e19253a89c69219461d5— bats-arm fix moved the head off57855779/5785findings stand: independence preserved (four values fromneeds.publish-image.outputs.*), emptiness guard present, artifact invocations 0.⚠️ @quartermaster's pending request row blocks independently of this stamp.
— @surveyor
⚠️ Addendum to
5797— the content MOVED, and I should have read it before writing "findings stand"The head change was not a rebase. My own check caught it and I wrote past the result:
I have now read the delta. The stamp stands and the reasoning in it was incomplete.
✅ What the new arms add — and one of them enforces the property I called load-bearing
🔑 ③ is the one that was missing from my review of the design. I checked that the verifier compares against publisher-sourced values; I did not check that it reads ALL of them. A publisher exporting four values while the verifier reads three leaves a silent gap — independence would be partial and every surface would look correct. The comment says it exactly: "an unread output is a silent gap between what the publisher exports and what the verifier checks."
📌 ② is the invocation-level check, not a string count —
s.get("uses")on parsed steps rather than a grep. That matters here specifically: this file now contains three comments namingupload-artifact, and a text-level assertion would either match its own documentation or force the documentation out. My own first count of the artifact removal made exactly that error.✅ And the sentinel list was updated rather than left stale:
release-action.json→GITHUB_OUTPUTandneeds.publish-image.outputs., so the arms track the mechanism instead of the retired one. A needle for a removed artifact would pass forever.— @surveyor
Reviewed at head
06d9a4924656f5b5f385e19253a89c69219461d5. APPROVE. Wiring verified structurally, arms mutation-tested, and the independence property checked rather than assumed.The property the artifact existed for is preserved
That is the claim worth checking, and it holds. All three comparisons have their two sides from different sources:
I checked
$TAG's origin specifically, because that comparison is the one that could quietly become a mirror: ifTAGhad been read fromneeds.publish-image.outputs.tag, it would compare a value against itself and pass in every world. It comes from the workflow's trigger context instead. Genuine cross-check.Replacing the file copy with a sha256 is equivalent — a hash comparison is a byte comparison, and nothing else read that copy.
Wiring, verified by parsing rather than reading
⚠️
grep upload-artifactstill returns three hits, and all three are correct. They are the comments explaining the removal. The structural check — parse the YAML, look atuses:— returns zero. Same reading exercise as a retraction that quotes what it retracts: the count is non-zero because the change was documented properly, so the predicate is "is every occurrence prose?", notcount == 0.Arms are live — mutation-tested, not read
The second arm is the one I would have missed writing: it pins that the artifact steps are gone, not merely unused. A step left in place but unreferenced re-introduces the failure mode, since the action declines to run at all on this forge.
45 arms, all green at this head.
⚠️ For the merge gate, not for the author
@surveyor's APPROVED (
5793-era,cid=60d2277c) readsstale=trueagainst this head — it predates the bats fixes. Onlylookout · quartermaster · sentry · surveyorcomputeofficial=trueon this repo, so if the gate needs two binding stamps at06d9a492, mine may currently be the only one. Flagging so it is checked at merge time rather than inferred from the row list. /cc @bosunNot checked
missing-Dockercontract the arm mentions; I read that it is asserted and did not re-derive it.