ersatztv/docs/ci-cd.md

CI/CD for the ErsatzTV Fork

The fork builds its own Docker image via Gitea Actions on the homelab and pushes to the Gitea container registry. Runner + registry were provisioned in server-management#172; the build pipeline is ersatztv#4; test/prod containers are server-management#481.

Hosts (read this before trusting a hostname below)

Host	IP	Role
jazz	192.168.1.29	Docker host for the media transcoders — prod ersatztv (8409), ersatztv-test (8410), Jellyfin. Release scans (security-scan.sh) and the prod-copy migration-smoke.sh run here.
bumblebee	192.168.1.99	CI runners (bumblebee-runner, small-runner), plus every other Docker stack. All the memory/lane measurements below were taken here.
ci-runner	VM 127 (pve4)	The other ubuntu-latest CI runner.

The transcoders moved bumblebee → jazz on 2026-07-20 (server-management#633).

Name-reuse trap. jazz was an earlier name for the .99 host. Anything written before 2026-07-20 that says "jazz" means today's bumblebee — resolve hostnames by IP, not by name, and don't "fix" a historical bumblebee reference into jazz.

Versioning & releases

The fork inherits upstream ErsatzTV's scheme: vYY.<release-seq>.<patch> (lightweight, v-prefixed git tags).

• YY — two-digit year.
• <release-seq> — a sequential release counter within the year, reset at each year boundary. It is not the calendar month. (Evidence: v25.2.0 shipped in June 2025, v25.5.0 in Sep, v26.3.0 in Feb 2026 — minors don't track months; and v25.9.0 → v26.1.0 shows the year-reset.)
• <patch> — a small follow-up/hotfix on the same release line (e.g. v26.1.0 → v26.1.1, days later).

Upstream's final release was v26.3.0 (archived). Our line continues from there:

Tag	Meaning
v26.3.1	Upstream 26.3.0 rebuilt on our infra (Gitea CI/registry, fork ffmpeg base) — no application changes. A patch bump, because nothing functional changed.
v26.4.0	First fork release carrying application changes. Later 2026 releases continue 26.5.0, 26.6.0, …; a new year resets to 27.1.0.
v26.7.0	Blazor-removal release: ChicoryTV became the only UI.
v26.8.0	Secured/versioned ChicoryTV SPA + REST API go-live release (#335).
v26.9.0	Configurable advertised IPTV base URL for M3U/XMLTV (#340) + SPA shell/routing + playouts modularization (#247/#245); on-air/Plex/library-path fixes (#99/#345/#371); coverage + functional-E2E CI (#15/#299).
v26.10.0	Auto-Tune channel workflow (#69) + weighted content distribution (#70); scheduling refactors, health-check remediation UX (#164), HLS cold-start instrumentation (#350), security hardening (#293/#376/#308).
v26.11.0	QSV profiles decode via VA-API — QsvPreferNativeDecoder, default on, fixes ~50% channel cold-start failures on Intel (#498); unified logo/on-screen bug via a shared watermark preset (#67). Media-scanner resilience: Jellyfin mixed-content libraries (#489), music-video scan correctness (#488/#494/#497), remote-stream probing before ffmpeg (#473/#480); weighted-distribution SPA (#404). First release deployed to jazz (server-management#633).
v26.12.0	ErsatzTV.Mcp MCP server — read + cautious-write over /api/v1, ERSATZTV_ALLOW_WRITES-gated (#58). External channel-logo URLs download + cache at save time (#525), with the on-screen bug now rendered for external-URL logos (#502). HLS cold-start hardening: burst-read the first segments so start isn't -readrate-bound (#350) and floor QSV extra hardware frames so an unthrottled read can't exhaust the pool (#529); remote graphics-engine image fetches bounded — timeout, size cap, decode cap, redirects, pooling (#511). Decision-lifecycle tooling + parallel-orientation startup rewrite (#520/#521); CI docker build lane rebalance (#508).
v26.13.0	RuleBuilder maturation — arbitrary-depth group nesting (#436), inline smart-query authoring in Channel Builder (#437), DB-sourced facet typeahead + relative-date operators + validation (#434/#435/#438), and an artist typeahead covering music-video/song credits with album_artist no longer 404ing (#578). Per-channel On Now/Next transient overlay (#74/#570) and per-schedule clock-boundary padding (#392); in-browser channel preview (#60); Auto-Tune per-source weight steppers + exclude/add-untagged (#440). Library-browse pickers now resolve by search instead of a 100-row window, closing several silent at-cap truncations (#644/#650/#651/#634). Correctness: one watermark resolver for all four attachment points, incl. MiddleCenter (#503/#510); QSV HDR tonemaps through OpenCL because vpp_qsv=tonemap is a silent no-op (#505); LibraryFolder unique index + concurrent-insert tolerance (#491); per-library music-video identity with soft trash (#496); Jellyfin Album/Track music-video projection (#177); metadata-collection dedup (#500); accented facet values via a registered Unicode fold on SQLite (#668); WorkAheadSlots atomic slot claim, never a negative count (#536/#539); on-demand guide rebuild on thaw (#68). Process/CI: the H10 review-verdict gate became a sha-bound required commit status and was hardened through its false-open chain (#622/#629/#632/#648/#649/#672/#698), the decision corpus split to one YAML-frontmatter record per file (#610/#620), and headless Playwright UI-E2E flows landed (#445/#533). Five dual-provider migrations.
v26.14.0	Live TV no longer starves on embedded bitmap subtitles — -readrate paces an input off its furthest-behind stream, and a PGS/DVD subtitle read through the video's own -i is sparse enough to drag the whole process to 0.53x realtime against the 1.0x a client consumes, draining the buffer until the channel stalls. Fixed with a capability-gated -readrate_catchup (ffmpeg 8.0+) on realtime inputs, keeping -readrate on the frame-producing path so the ffmpeg.qsv-extra-hw-frames-floor bound is untouched; measured 0.533x → 1.067x on QSV and software, with a 240s QSV soak clean of allocation errors (#726). Affects items carrying an embedded bitmap subtitle matching the channel's subtitle mode — 3,182 of 24,646 media versions on prod, and a property of the item, not the channel, which is why the stall presented as random. Process/CI: the H10 review-verdict gate's repair sentinel became a fixed point and its write is now fenced on the timeline retarget count, closing a raced-sentinel false-open (#706/#707/#711). The decisions validator now cross-checks its dependency-free frontmatter parse against PyYAML and reports both the truncating unquoted # and the scalar-closing bare apostrophe as errors, so a record whose rule: silently halves under PyYAML fails the local gate instead of CI (#674/#688) — the ceiling-calibration claim was also split so the suite pins what the derivation MEANS rather than live-corpus order statistics. Dependencies: CliWrap 3.10.4, JetBrains.ReSharper.GlobalTools 2025.3.5.
v26.15.0	main became PR-only, which is what makes review-verdict/h10 load-bearing — branch protection now carries enable_push: false and block_admin_merge_override: true, so a direct git push origin HEAD:main is refused at pre-receive for every account including a site admin, and an admin cannot force-merge past a missing or red required context (#743/#749). Gitea only evaluates status_check_contexts on the PR merge path, so before this the whole gate was skippable with no forgery needed. The gate was then hardened through the rest of its false-open chain: CI's registry credential scoped so a head-resolved workflow cannot forge the status (#697), a stray expression delimiter in a comment that killed the gate outright and is now banned on the release path itself by a scan job build depends on (#751/#767), a positive verdict inherited only from an allow-listed reviewer (#742), the PR-timeline HEAD alias fenced on the pull_push count (#803/#664), and both /statuses/{sha} reads paged to a validated terminator (#763). App-facing: FFmpeg profile numeric fields are bounded with a 422 that names the bound and its consequence instead of being silently rewritten, and readrate pacing is exposed as a profile field (#735 — one dual-provider migration, Add_FFmpegProfile_ReadRatePacing). On Now / Next gets a boxed background and is on by default (#732). Field-level progressive disclosure lands as a shared FieldHelp trigger + portalled panel, adopted on FFmpeg Profiles and documented as docs/spa-conventions.md §15 (#734). Auto-Tune proposal rows align on a grid (#721); AddItemsDialog resolves by search instead of windowing a whole media-library type, with stale-response and is-mounted guards (#685/#740). Correctness: a paged handler now counts the same query it pages, so a filtered page stops reporting the unfiltered total across playouts, rerun collections and six sibling handlers (#690/#758); nullable primitive collections are guarded at the read site rather than mutated on a tracked entity — SongMetadata.Artists in both search indexers (#701/#824) and the scheduling DaysOfMonth/MonthsOfYear/DaysOfWeek columns, where a runtime NULL reads as unrestricted (#823); SPA full-replace bodies are built as Complete<T> so an omitted optional DTO field is a type error (#807); and every ErsatzTV.Mcp tool is pinned to its OpenAPI contract, with graphicsElementIds and padToNearestMinute declared so an MCP channel update stops silently stripping the overlay (#754/#757). Process/CI: one rule for how a guard derives its population and one for the proof it ships with, both enforced (#774/#775) — populations come from the git index, never a filesystem walk (#806/#819), every MUTATION grade is executed each suite rather than asserted in prose (#790), and verification code is itself code under test (#796). Workflows declare their own per-job metadata and guard populations derive from it (#786/#789); all six declare permissions: (#748); ci-image.yml publishes from main only and the persisted checkout credential is gone (#744/#746/#835). Hooks report their own execution and the report is measured (#776), and docs.no-session-narrative was generalized to every durable artifact and the sites its sweep IDENTIFIED were remediated as judgements rather than by regex — no closure is claimed over a phrasing space (#784/#812). A ruff config is committed and enforced in CI (#780). Dependencies: Scriban.Signed 7.2.6. Cut at 736649b3b, not at main's head: completeAnnotations.guard.test.ts (merged in the very next commit) needs a git index the Dockerfile's web-build stage does not have, so every image build after 736649b3b fails — including a tag build (#887). 736649b3b is the newest commit whose Build & push image (amd64) actually ran green. The scheduling-recurrence fix #880 therefore slips to the next release.

Before cutting a release — sweep docs/decisions.md + docs/decisions/ (ersatztv#521, supersedes the ersatztv#303 H9 append-only ritual). Supersession/retirement is now a same-PR act (add the new active record, relocate the predecessor to docs/decisions/archive/ with reciprocal supersedes/superseded-by links), not a release-boundary batch job — most of the old "consolidate" step is now continuous. The release boundary is instead where you:

1. Run PYTHONPATH=. python3 scripts/decisions_validate.py — confirms lifecycle metadata is well-formed and every supersedes/superseded-by link resolves both ways. Since ersatztv#674 it also cross-checks its dependency-free frontmatter parse against PyYAML when PyYAML is importable, failing on any file PyYAML rejects (a bare apostrophe in a single-quoted value) or reads differently (an unquoted #, which YAML truncates as a comment). Where PyYAML is absent — the decisions-guard job, the Husky hooks — the cross-check is skipped with a ::notice:: and every other check still runs; the read path stays dependency-free.

2. Confirm every record already classified superseded/retired actually lives under docs/decisions/archive/ (the validator fails this, but eyeball it at the boundary too).

3. Regenerate the active catalog: PYTHONPATH=. python3 scripts/build_decisions_catalog.py and commit any drift.

4. Read the corpus size signals. Since ersatztv#620 these are two separate things:

   • a per-record prose ceiling (decisions_validate.py --record-ceiling <n>, default 60) — a non-blocking ::warning:: naming every record over it. This is the actionable signal: it points at a file. The 60 is derived from the distribution, not picked as a round number. Its calibration is guarded in two pieces of different robustness (ersatztv#688), because four earlier single-assertion versions all failed — the first two by being vacuous or accepting an absurd ceiling, the last two by ratcheting:
     • blocking (script-tests) — only the coarse property that the ceiling flags a meaningful minority of records (0.02 <= fraction_over <= 0.25). One record moves a fraction by at most 1/N, so no SINGLE ordinary addition can cross it. This is measured headroom, not immunity: from today's 18/183 it takes 38 consecutive over-ceiling additions to breach the cap, 718 short ones to dilute below the floor, or — the tightest arm — consolidating 15 of the 18 offenders away. The floor is a fraction rather than "at least one record", which would accept any ceiling up to 229 on the live corpus; as a fraction the accepted range is 43..180.
     • reported, never asserted against the LIVE corpus — the fine claim that the ceiling sits between the 90th and 95th percentile, i.e. at the tail boundary. main() prints a ::notice:: when it drifts; the tests assert it only on distributions they own. It is an order statistic over a sparse distribution, so a single new record could move p90 by 21 lines and red the blocking job for whoever wrote it; a ceiling going out of date is the passage of corpus growth, not a defect in the commit under test, so it is treated like stale-after. Re-derive the constant when the notice says so.
   • the aggregate prose total, printed every run as an unthresholded ::notice:: trend. It has no pass/fail. A total over a monotonically growing corpus can only ratchet: the old 4800→5600 budget went quiet at 5228 after #610 changed the metric and was back over at 5658 three and a half hours later the same evening, with nobody consolidating anything — the "permanently red = no signal" failure, not in slow motion at all. It reports record prose and non-record scaffolding separately, because they are not the same unit. The generated catalog is no longer counted at all — it gains one row per record and cannot be consolidated away.

   Being listed by the ceiling is an invitation to check for redundancy, not an instruction to cut. A long record that is entirely distinct findings is a legitimate decline — say so in the record and move on. (--budget is still accepted and ignored, so old invocations keep working.)

5. Report the remaining legacy-unmigrated count (the validator prints it as a ::notice::) so the backlog is visible, even though it isn't required to hit zero before a release. A genuine rationale-prose rewrite still needs a Decisions-Edit: yes git trailer on a non-merge commit in the range (see the decisions.md header) — routine lifecycle metadata writes above do not.

Cutting a release: keep build and promotion as two explicit phases (#335):

1. Confirm main CI is green; run the full local gate plus dotnet list package --vulnerable --include-transitive; then push a vYY.N.P tag on that exact main commit.
2. Wait for tag CI to build :prod + the immutable :<version> + :<sha> images. Run scripts/security-scan.sh on jazz against the immutable :<version> image, not a moving tag, and triage every ZAP/semgrep finding.
3. Only after the candidate passes, manually DeployStack jazz-media and observe its pre-deploy output. Prod's compose deliberately follows floating :prod (Timothy's 2026-07-11 decision), so no CI push or pin bump is needed.

The Komodo stack is jazz-media, not media-servers (verified live 2026-07-20 during the v26.11.0 cut). The compose project is still media-servers — which is what the container labels show — but the Komodo stack name changed with the move to jazz. A stack named media-servers still exists on bumblebee and is unhealthy (the stopped migration leftovers), so DeployStack media-servers silently targets the dead stack. Confirm with /read ListStacks before deploying.

A third stack, literally named ersatztv, is also live and is NOT prod: it owns ersatztv-test, tracks the floating :latest tag, and runs with auto_update: true. (Stack name, compose project, config-file path and image tag re-confirmed from the container labels on jazz 2026-08-11; the auto_update flags and the bumblebee unhealthy status are carried from the earlier checks noted above, not re-measured that day.) DeployStack ersatztv succeeds and looks healthy — it just promotes nothing to prod. Three names, one target:

Stack name	project_name	auto_update	owns
jazz-media	media-servers	false	ersatztv (prod, tracks :prod)
ersatztv	ersatztv	true	ersatztv-test (tracks :latest)
media-servers	—	—	dead stack on bumblebee, unhealthy

Don't resolve the prod stack by name at all — resolve it by the container's com.docker.compose.project.config_files label (e.g. via docker inspect), which points at the actual compose file path and can't be confused by a same-named stack.

There is no Global Auto Update fallback anymore: jazz-media has auto_update: false (poll_for_updates: true only), so nothing promotes :prod on a timer — promotion is manual, full stop. The old "don't cut a tag near the 03:00 run" caveat no longer applies.

server-management#585 source-confirmed that Global Auto Update invokes the same DeployStack execution as a manual promotion, and extended the #553 pre-deploy hook to detect a floating-tag digest change. Either path now takes the fail-closed prod backup; server-management#589 then wired migration-smoke.sh into that hook, against the exact candidate and the backup it just made. A backup, fetch, or migration-smoke failure aborts before the live container is recreated. See homelab-docs/Docker/ErsatzTV.md for the operational evidence and rollback procedure.

Gotcha: never put a [skip ci] token in a commit you intend to tag — Gitea reads skip-ci from the tagged commit and will suppress the release build. (Also, workflow_dispatch on a tag ref isn't supported on this Gitea version, so the tag push must do the triggering.) Release commits, and anything you'll tag, must not contain skip-ci.

Also avoid firing several pushes back-to-back (e.g. a [skip ci] commit, then main, then a tag, all within ~1s). Observed once on this Gitea instance: the later events were silently dropped — no ActionRun records created at all, even though the runner was online and the workflow active. Pushing again, spaced out, created the runs normally. If a push/tag doesn't produce a run, re-push (or push an empty commit) rather than assuming the runner is broken.

Workflow token scope (permissions:, ersatztv#748)

Every workflow in this repo declares permissions:. Five declare code: read at the top level; review-verdict.yml declares code: write + issues: read + pull-requests: read on its set-verdict-status job and nothing at the top level. That is the whole convention — a new workflow should declare the narrowest set it needs, and say at the declaration why it needs write if it does.

Declaring permissions: is exhaustive, not additive. A unit omitted is a unit not granted, and that holds at any owner-level default — it is not conditional on the instance default being Restricted. This is the property that makes the block load-bearing rather than decorative, and it is also what makes a wrong one dangerous: the gate job's API calls are curl -sf under set -euo pipefail, so a missing unit is a 403 that kills the step, and review-verdict/h10 is never posted. That blocks every merge to main, including the PR that would repair it, and since ersatztv#743 (block_admin_merge_override: true) there is no force-merge escape.

code: write and not something narrower because Gitea has no statuses scope. POST /repos/{o}/{r}/statuses/{sha} is gated by reqRepoWriter(unit.TypeCode), so status-write is Code-write (ci.actions-credential-scoping). contents: write would also work but additionally grants releases: write, which nothing here uses. The two read units are not spare: the job GETs /issues/{n}/timeline (the ersatztv#706 retarget fence) and, through scripts/pr-changed-files.sh, /pulls/{n} and /pulls/{n}/files (the ersatztv#698 exemption path).

No workflow needs a packages: unit. All five container: blocks in docker-build.yml carry explicit credentials: using the scoped REGISTRY_* PAT, so no job pulls the toolchain image with the injected token.

The binding was measured, not assumed (2026-08-27, Gitea 1.27.1)

ci.actions-credential-scoping recorded for three weeks that whether permissions: is honored on this instance was unprobed — 1.26.0 was the version it was said to start binding at, from release notes rather than from an experiment. It was settled with the scratch-base probe below, run as a matched pair that differed only in one unit:

Control	Gate job unit	Result
Positive	code: write	job success; Posted review-verdict/h10-PROBE=success; creator: null
Negative	code: read	job failure; curl exit 22 (HTTP ≥400 under -f) at the POST; no status written

Both runs reached the classify step's start marker, so neither failure was the ersatztv#751 dropped-step shape. What shows each read unit was exercised is a different observation for each, and they are not interchangeable:

• issues: read — both runs logged Retarget fence: 0 retarget event(s) … (trusted=yes), which requires the timeline walk to have read /issues/{n}/timeline. That log line and the function behind it were renamed by ersatztv#803, which added the head axis to the same walk: the line now reads Mutation fence: N retarget event(s) and M push event(s) … (trusted=…) and the function is count_pr_mutations. The observation above is left as it was recorded — it is what those runs printed — but grep for the new strings when reproducing it.
• pull-requests: read — the positive control posted =success, and a success is reachable only through complete=yes, which requires scripts/pr-changed-files.sh to have paged /pulls/{n} and /pulls/{n}/files to a validated end. The fence and the start marker do not show this; the success does.

The negative control is the load-bearing half: it is what shows the declaration binds rather than being a no-op that happens to sit next to a permissive default. Both controls carried the block at job level, on set-verdict-status — the same level and the same job as the shipped review-verdict.yml, so the gate's own shape is what was measured.

Both ran while the owner default was still permissive, so the binding holds today, without any flip. One scope limit, stated rather than glossed: the other five workflows declare permissions: at top level, a form the probe did not exercise. That is inferred, not measured — but the failure direction is safe (a top-level key Gitea ignored would be a security no-op, never a brick), and docker-build.yml and pr-checks.yml are on: pull_request, so this change's own CI exercises theirs.

What the probe does NOT establish — read this before flipping the owner default. It says nothing about what a declared code: write receives under a Restricted default. GitHub's semantics let permissions: only narrow, never widen past the default; if Gitea copies that, Restricted would cap the gate job at read and review-verdict/h10 would become unwritable — precisely the failure this section warns about, with no force-merge escape. Both controls ran under permissive, so that case is untested. server-management#714 stays open for exactly this: re-run the scratch-base probe under Restricted before trusting the flip.

creator: null on the positive control matters separately: it is the provenance signal review-verdict.yml relies on to tell a machine-written status from a reviewer's (ci.exemption-provenance, ersatztv#742). Approach A — scoping the built-in token — preserves it. Moving status writes onto a PAT (approach B) would not, which is why B stays blocked.

What this does and does not close. Scoping bounds what a job may do; it never bounds whether attacker YAML runs — that needs a trigger filter (ersatztv#744). And review-verdict.yml still holds repo-write. The property gained is not "workflows can no longer assert the verdict"; it is that only a workflow visibly opting into repo-write can, instead of every job on the instance holding write implicitly. Real, and weaker than closed.

⚠️ Changing review-verdict.yml's block requires the scratch-base probe, not CI-green on the editing PR — that workflow is base-resolved and is never exercised by its own PR, so its own checks say nothing about the edit. See the probe recipe in the review-verdict gate section below.

The other five split two ways, and only one half is covered by an editing PR's own CI:

• docker-build.yml and pr-checks.yml run on pull_request, so an editing PR exercises their blocks directly. (docker-build.yml's build job carries if: github.event_name != 'pull_request', so its registry-push path is first exercised on the post-merge push to main — that reddens main, not the gate, and is recoverable.)
• ci-image.yml (push to main only since ersatztv#744, plus schedule/workflow_dispatch), dependency-scan.yml and renovate.yml are not exercised by an editing PR at all — their first run is after merge or on the next schedule. None is a required check, so a wrong block there reddens a non-blocking run rather than the gate, but do not read an editing PR's green as covering them.

ci-image.yml is included, and only just. It was the one workflow this change could not originally reach: editing it re-pointed ci-image-pin's expected at the editing commit and reddened a blocking job, and its own paths: made the edit publish a toolchain image. ersatztv#748 briefly carried a documented one-name exemption for it. ersatztv#744 (ci.toolchain-image-publish-is-a-dispatch) took that path out of both, so the exemption was deleted rather than documented — which is the form ersatztv#835 asked for, and it is why test_pr_changed_files.py asserts over the whole derived population with nothing carved out.

Checkouts drop the persisted credential (ersatztv#746)

Every actions/checkout in this repo sets persist-credentials: false — with no exemption, since ersatztv#744 removed the one that existed (see "The last exemption, and how it closed" below), and ersatztv#835 now holds the rule mechanically rather than by convention: scripts/tests/test_workflow_persist_credentials.py derives the workflow population from the git index and asserts the flag on every checkout step it finds. Without it the action leaves an Authorization header in .git/config, and a head-resolved job then hands that credential to every script it runs, not just to the checkout. That header is write-capable only while the job's token is: this instance's Actions default token permission is permissive, where it stands after a Restricted trial was reverted on 2026-08-05 — but since ersatztv#748 that default no longer decides it. Every workflow declares permissions: (see the section above), so every persisted header in this repo is read-only by declaration. Re-applying the owner-level default is server-management#714. No job that checks out loses anything: none of them push with git, and anonymous access covers the fetches because the repo is public — private: false, and GET /info/refs?service=git-upload-pack answers unauthenticated, measured 2026-08-26 from the LAN. That measures the repository, not a runner's network path to it, and the runner path is deliberately not asserted here: it does not need to be, because the fetches in the jobs below are unmasked: an anonymous fetch that failed from a runner reddens api-docs, Formatting and decisions lifecycle instead of being swallowed. (The two masked fetches further down are covered by their own argument, not by this one.) Renovate does push branches, but renovate.yml has no actions/checkout step at all and carries its own RENOVATE_TOKEN.

The base-ref fetches that feed the changed-file skip logic — in docs-reminder, decisions lifecycle, api-docs and Formatting — therefore run unmasked: a failed git fetch — and a failed git diff at the three steps that run one inline — exit the step with an ::error:: instead of yielding an empty changed set. That ordering is the general rule, not a fact about one change: unmask a dependent fetch before you drop a persisted credential anywhere. Under || true a credential regression looked like "nothing changed" on the three steps that also masked git diff, so those checks skipped themselves silently on a green job; on the other two it handed a possibly-absent origin/<base> to a Python validator. Neither shape is one you want a credential change to land on top of.

What this does and does not make fail-closed. A failed fetch now reddens api-docs, Formatting and decisions lifecycle, which is the credential/network case this change exists for. It does not make the two validator steps fail-closed in general: they run no inline git diff, and if the base resolves badly despite a successful fetch, scripts/decisions_validate.py emits a ::warning:: and skips its diff-dependent checks while scripts/check-doc-narrative.py prints SCANNED NOTHING and exits 0. Both fail open there by their own design and are out of scope here — do not read a green decisions lifecycle as proof its diff-dependent checks ran. Note which side of that line the Decisions-Edit: yes trailer check falls on: _edit_trailer_armed is reached only after the merge base resolves, so it goes quiet with the rest of them rather than surviving.

Loud is not the same as blocking, and the split is by job. api-docs, Formatting and decisions lifecycle gate on this diff, so a failed fetch reddens them. docs-reminder does not — it is a non-blocking nudge, and an advisory red still joins the combined status the merge gate reads. All three of its non-checkout steps therefore carry continue-on-error: true — the parity nudge, Set up Python and the doc-narrative warning — so the ::error:: reaches the log without turning a warning into a merge block. Checkout is deliberately still blocking; with no tree there is nothing to warn about.

None of these fetches passes --depth. All five run in jobs that check out fetch-depth: 0, and git fetch --depth=N on a complete clone grafts it shallow: the history is still there but cut off, so git diff origin/<base>...HEAD fails with no merge base once the branch point is further back than N. Measured 2026-08-26: a 150-commit repo branched 130 back, --depth=100, .git/shallow created, three-dot diff fatal: no merge base; the same fetch without --depth returns the correct file list. Under the old || true that surfaced as a silent skip; unmasked it would have reddened api-docs and Formatting on any branch not rebased recently, sent docs-reminder's parity nudge advisory-red, and left decisions lifecycle green with its diff-dependent checks silently skipped — so the depth came off with the mask. The same graft, reached through the detector script rather than a workflow step, is what stamped :latest images InformationalVersion 0.0.0-<sha> until ersatztv#836 — see below.

Two masked fetches that stay masked, deliberately. scripts/ci-detect-docs-only.sh and scripts/ci-detect-already-validated.sh both swallow a failed fetch — and should. In both, a failed fetch can only leave the base revision unresolvable, and an unresolvable base emits false: run the full matrix / full validation. Neither can turn a failed fetch into a skip. Masking there costs runner time and nothing else, which is the opposite direction from the workflow steps above, where the same masking bought a silently skipped check. Judge these by which way the failure falls, not by the || true.

That clears their masking and nothing else. Their --depth was a separate question with a separate answer, and it is the one that shipped a defect (ersatztv#836).

A depth is passed only to a checkout that is already shallow. ci-detect-docs-only.sh routes both its fetches through fetch_ref, which asks git rev-parse --is-shallow-repository and drops the --depth on any answer but true. The script has exactly four consumers — test, migrations and functional-e2e at fetch-depth: 2, and build at fetch-depth: 0. Enumerate them with grep -rn ci-detect-docs-only .gitea/, not by looking for a step with id: detect: api-docs and format have one of those too, and it runs their own inline diff.

So build is the only complete-clone consumer, and the push arm is the only arm it takes. That is where the cost landed: its --depth=2 grafted build's complete clone, the git describe --tags in the immediately following step found no reachable tag, and a || echo v0.0.0 fallback that cannot fail turned that into a version. Every :latest image published from main carried InformationalVersion 0.0.0-<sha> instead of 26.x.y-<sha> — read off the live test container as 0.0.0-5a7a4ed7 on 2026-08-26, six weeks after the depth landed with #416 on 2026-07-17, because nothing went red.

The PR arm's --depth=200 had no complete-clone consumer at all (on pull_request only the three shallow jobs run this script), so it was inert rather than latently firing. It goes through the same helper anyway, because the clause is shared and the next fetch-depth: 0 consumer of that arm would inherit the graft silently. Keeping the depth for the shallow three is likewise conservative rather than required: a depth-less fetch into a --depth=2 clone leaves .git/shallow in place, still writes FETCH_HEAD, and still reports the parents the push arm reads.

Both halves are now held by something that executes. scripts/tests/test_docs_only_detector_clone_depth.py drives the real script over real file:// clones and asserts the clone is still complete and git describe still resolves afterwards, with a negative control that requires the fixture to be able to graft at all — a plain path clone silently ignores --depth, which would make the whole file vacuous. And Compute version and tags no longer defaults: a failed git describe on the non-tag path fails the job rather than stamping 0.0.0, so no :latest is published instead of a mislabelled one. The tag path never calls describe, so a release cut is unaffected either way.

The last exemption, and how it closed

ci-image.yml's checkout was the one left unset, and the reason was mechanical rather than a judgement that it was safe: any commit touching .gitea/workflows/ci-image.yml re-pointed ci-image-pin's expected at itself and reddened that blocking job, and the file's unfiltered push trigger published a toolchain image from whatever branch the edit landed on. Both are gone (ersatztv#744): the trigger is branches: [main] and the file is no longer one of expected's paths, so the flag went on in the same change. What this costs the guard is nothing, and that is the point — ersatztv#835 was deliberately held back rather than shipped with a one-entry ci-image.yml exemption, because such an entry outlives its reason silently: once the flag went on there the exemption would still have passed and the guard would have been permanently blind to the file it was written for.

Per-job declarations (env.CI_EXECUTION_CLASS, env.CI_JOB_ROLE — ersatztv#786/#789)

Every job in every tracked workflow declares CI_JOB_ROLE; the jobs in docker-build.yml also declare CI_EXECUTION_CLASS (the scopes differ — see the table). They are metadata, not runtime inputs: nothing reads them at execution time. They exist so that a guard comparing sets of jobs derives its expected set from the workflow instead of from a literal list in the checker.

Marker	Values	Scope	Derived by
CI_EXECUTION_CLASS	toolchain, bare-runner	docker-build.yml only — the sole workflow using the toolchain image	scripts/tests/test_ci_image_pin_population.py
CI_JOB_ROLE	guard, report-only, none	every tracked workflow	scripts/tests/test_workflow_job_guards.py

A missing marker and an unrecognised value both fail the suite. Neither defaults: a scheme whose absent value reads as some safe class stops applying the moment a job is added and nobody notices.

CI_JOB_ROLE is decided by what the job PRODUCES. A guard job's output is a verdict; a none job's output is an artifact, and a red there means the build did not work rather than that an invariant was violated. docker-build.yml::build publishes an image and smoke-tests it, and is none. Which jobs are none is read off the markers rather than listed here — a list in prose is a second copy of the workflow that rots on the next job added. Every guard/report-only job holds a row in docs/guard-inventory.md → "Workflow-job guards", cross-checked both ways.

report-only is the third value: a verdict the job cannot enforce, because every check step carries continue-on-error: true.

A rejected alternative, so it is not re-adopted: "a guard enforces an invariant about the repository, so a job exercising the product is none" reads as more principled and is wrong — it puts test and migrations outside the population, and those are the two required status contexts on main, i.e. precisely where a failure to fire is fail-open against branch protection.

Why not a literal list, since one stood here until #789 with a real argument behind it: set equality between two derived sets is blind to a member leaving both at once, so a job that loses its container: block leaves the declared and the pinned set together and the comparison stays balanced. That needs an anchor that does not move with the block — and a reviewed literal was the only one available. The marker is the same anchor, better placed: it lives in the job it describes, so it is reachable by anyone reading that job and it moves with the job when the job is renamed. (Not "in the same hunk" — measured, the marker sits 6–7 lines from the container: block in four jobs and 58 in migrations, where the services: block sits between them. Proximity is a convenience; the property the guard rests on is that the marker does not move when the block does.)

Its cost is proximity, so the scheme does not stop there. A literal in a distant file survives a careless workflow edit; a marker a handful of lines from the container: block can go with it. So test_no_job_needs_the_toolchain_without_declaring_it derives the requirement a third time — from each job's own step bodies, looking for tools that exist only in the CI image (dotnet, dotnet-ef, node, npm, npx, ffmpeg, ffprobe, playwright, reportgenerator — the list lives in TOOLCHAIN_ONLY_TOOLS, and this sentence is a summary of it, not a second copy to keep in sync). git/jq/python3/curl/tar are excluded because they do not discriminate: the bare-runner lanes provide or provision them too. That check depends on neither the marker nor the block, and it is the only one that catches a .NET step moved into a bare-runner job, where no set changes at all.

It is a necessary condition only: a job whose only toolchain use sat behind a script would be invisible to it. Measured — the blind-spot set is empty today: all five declared toolchain jobs are detected directly, functional-e2e included (it runs dotnet restore and npm ci in its own steps before handing off to scripts/e2e-local.sh). The converse is still not asserted, because a future job could be written that way and a red on a correct tree is how a guard gets deleted.

The residual, stated because it is the one that matters. All three checks go BLIND together (none of them reddens) under one plausible edit: drop the container: block, flip the marker, and move the invocation into a script. Both set comparisons then stay balanced and the step scan sees no token. What bounds this is the failure mode, not its likelihood — the job runs a missing binary and dies with dotnet: command not found, loud and immediate, where ersatztv#774's original defect sent a required check green on the bare runner. Trading a silent pass for a noisy crash is the point; it is not a claim the hole is closed.

Full rationale: docs/decisions/records/testing/workflow-declares-its-own-job-metadata.md.

The workflow: .gitea/workflows/docker-build.yml

Single workflow. Gating jobs test + migrations run in parallel and gate build; a non-blocking docs-reminder job runs on PRs only (see below). Prod deploy is not a CI job — it's Komodo Global Auto Update off the :prod tag (see "Cutting a release").

Triggers & tags

Trigger	test job	build job	Image tags pushed
pull_request	✅	— (skipped)	none
push to main	✅	✅	:latest + :<short-sha>
push tag v*	✅	✅	:prod + :<version> + :<short-sha>
workflow_dispatch	✅	✅	only if ref is main/v*, else build-only (no push)

A docs-only change (see "Docs-only skip" below) reduces every ✅ above to a seconds-long no-op that still reports its status.

:latest is the test/dev channel (every main commit). Prod's compose follows the floating :prod tag (reverted from the 2026-07-07 version pin on 2026-07-11) — never :latest. Both :prod and :<version> are produced by pushing a v* tag; prod tracks :prod and is redeployed by Komodo Global Auto Update (see "Cutting a release"). The immutable :<version> tags remain for reproducible rollback (docker run …:26.6.0).

Concurrency is scoped per event+ref (group: ersatztv-build-${{ github.event_name }}-${{ github.ref }}, cancel-in-progress for PRs): PR runs parallelize across PRs, a new sync auto-cancels its superseded run, and image builds still serialize within their own ref. Do NOT push main and a v* tag simultaneously — those are separate groups but share the :buildcache tag and the smoke container name; tag only after the main build is green. (History: originally one global group serializing ALL runs for the single runner — with three runners that starved the queue; changed 2026-07-11, server-management#574.)

Four runners serve the fork (server-management#570/#574/#639):

Runner	Host	Label	Slots	Per-job cap
ci-runner	VM 127 (pve4) — no prod workload	ubuntu-latest	4	--cpus=4 --memory=10g
bumblebee-runner	bumblebee — prod media	ubuntu-latest	2	--cpus=4 --memory=10g --cpu-shares=256
small-runner	bumblebee — prod media	small	2	--cpus=1 --memory=1g --cpu-shares=256
jazz-small-runner	jazz — prod media (#633)	small	2	--cpus=1 --memory=1g --cpu-shares=128

The small lane exists because Gitea dispatches a job as a runner task even when its if skips it, and those skip-tasks used to wait behind long builds (observed 31 min), stalling every PR run. --cpu-shares below the default 1024 is what makes a runner on a prod media host acceptable: under contention CI loses to the transcoders (ersatztv 1536 / jellyfin), which are the reason those hosts exist.

That same "dispatched even when if skips it" behavior is why the git-only PR gates live in their own PR gates workflow (pr-checks.yml, on: pull_request) rather than in docker-build.yml — see that section (ersatztv#535).

small is git-only, and that is load-bearing (server-management#639). Everything in the lane is a checkout plus a git diff: decisions-guard, ci-image-pin, docs-reminder — plus prove-fix (ersatztv#794), the heaviest member: per commit carrying a Proves: trailer it makes two git worktree adds and runs an arbitrary pytest selection twice, so a PR claiming many proofs costs proportionally more than the rest of the lane combined — plus script-tests, which is a checkout plus a pytest run needing only pytest and pyyaml (ersatztv#631; it is NOT stdlib-only — that assumption is what turned the job red on its first CI run, see below) — plus scan (ersatztv#767), the same lightweight-Python shape, and toolchain-preflight (ersatztv#772), a checkout plus one curl. Those last two are the lane members that live in docker-build.yml rather than pr-checks.yml, so they are the ones that also run on a tag push. scan is still the one to think hardest about before changing anything here: its failure does not merely redden a status but skips build — an OOM or a wedge there yields no release image at all. toolchain-preflight is a needs: of nothing, by design — it does not gate the jobs it diagnoses. It is not consequence-free either: like any red job it lands in the PR's combined status, which the merge gate reads (see "When the pinned tag disappears"). Nothing there runs a compiler or a docker build, which is why the lane can be capped at 1 GiB per job. The lightweight-Python jobs are the deliberate edge of the "git-only" rule, not an exception to it: setup-python + pip install pytest + a suite whose heaviest allocation is a handful of temp-dir git repos stays far under the cap. Route a heavy job here and it will OOM — give it ubuntu-latest, or its own label on ci-runner, the only host with no prod workload.

Lane assignment (ersatztv#390). Slot counts below are as-of 2026-07-17; the table above is current. At the time, the ubuntu-latest lane had 4 slots (2 + 2) and the small lane 4. A 2026-07-17 audit of the Actions API found the ubuntu-latest lane saturated and the small lane idle — queue wait exceeded every job's runtime:

Job	Runtime	Queue wait	Lane
test	354s	1363s	ubuntu-latest
migrations	639s	1428s	ubuntu-latest
functional-e2e	520s	1447s	ubuntu-latest
api-docs	5s	1722s	ubuntu-latest → small → reverted to ubuntu-latest (#406)
format	37s → ~0.5s (#469)	1731s	ubuntu-latest → small → reverted to ubuntu-latest (#406)
docs-reminder / decisions-guard	10s	5s	small

api-docs and format moved to small because the queue wait dwarfed their runtime. Both lanes run the identical runner-images:ubuntu-latest base, so small was a label with spare capacity, not a different capability — a move only possible because those jobs now run in the CI toolchain image (below) and no longer need the runner image to supply .NET/Node.

Reverted 2026-07-17 (ersatztv#406 / server-management#604). #390's own caveat — "on an API-touching PR api-docs does a full dotnet build, so it is not always small" — turned out to be the deciding factor, and "capacity 4 absorbs that" held only because nothing enforces the sum of the lanes' per-job caps. Each job container is correctly capped (--memory=10g), but 6 slots × 10 GiB = 60 GiB on a 25 GiB host that also runs prod media; on 2026-07-17 bumblebee hit load 340 with 21 GiB swapped. These were not small jobs — a live docker stats caught the format job container at 3.95 GiB, which the re-sized 2 GiB small lane would OOM-kill outright. #604 fixes the queue at the source instead (ubuntu-latest grown to 5 slots: a 48 GiB ci-runner at capacity 4 plus a bumblebee overflow slot), so the small lane can be reserved for genuinely-tiny shell jobs. (The format half of this is now moot: ersatztv#469 moved it to dotnet format whitespace . --folder, which loads no Roslyn workspace — the job's 3.95 GiB heap and multi-minute runtime are gone, so it is no longer a reason to keep the lane large. api-docs on an API-touching PR still is.)

Queue wait is still a dominant cost and capacity is server-management's boundary — tracked in server-management#604. The redundant triple-build behind those runtimes is ersatztv#398.

The other failure mode: setup-phase starvation (server-management#639, 2026-07-20). The table above measures queue wait — time before a job is dispatched. A saturated lane also produces a second, much more confusing symptom: a job that is dispatched, sits in_progress for >10 minutes, writes no log file at all (OpenLogs … .log.zst: file does not exist), and then fails — wedged in act's job-setup phase, before Checkout. Same-config siblings that started 90s earlier finished in seconds; a concurrent job's log showed a normally-fast compile taking a 7-minute gap between projects. This is the origin of the "decisions.md is a known flake, just rerun it" folklore: the rerun succeeds only because it lands after load clears, so the guard's logic gets blamed for a capacity problem.

The fix was not more capacity for its own sake. small was stuck at one slot because it still held two heavy jobs — docker-build.yml's image build and ci-image.yml's toolchain buildx (the latter reads as lightweight because it is "docker-only", but it is the heaviest thing that ran in the lane) — and their 10 GiB requirement set the lane's per-job cap, which on a 25 GiB host permits exactly one slot. Moving both to ubuntu-latest made the lane genuinely tiny, so it could widen to 4 slots across two hosts while committing less RAM to CI than the single slot did. docker-build.yml's build does not re-create #574's skip-task queueing, because needs: [test, migrations, scan] means it cannot be dispatched until the lane it would queue behind has already drained.

CI build memory: no persistent compiler servers (ersatztv#406)

Roslyn's VBCSCompiler is a persistent compiler server — it outlives the dotnet build that started it and keeps its heap warm for the next one. Locally that is a genuine speedup; in CI it buys nothing, because each job container is torn down at the end of the run and there is never a "next build" to warm. It was measured at 7.8 GB RSS on bumblebee — the single largest consumer on the host, and the reason each job needed a 10 GiB cap in the first place.

So the workflow's top-level env: disables the servers for every runner-side dotnet job:

Variable	Effect
UseSharedCompilation=false	no persistent VBCSCompiler; csc runs per project and exits
DOTNET_CLI_USE_MSBUILD_SERVER=0	no persistent MSBuild server process
MSBUILDDISABLENODEREUSE=1	MSBuild worker nodes exit with the build instead of lingering

These are MSBuild properties set as environment variables so they apply to every dotnet invocation without touching each call site (MSBuild surfaces env vars as properties, and UseSharedCompilation is only defaulted to true when empty, so the env var wins).

What this does and does not shrink. It helps the jobs that compile — test, migrations, api-docs on an API-touching PR, and the in-Docker build. It never helped format: dotnet format loaded Roslyn in-process via MSBuildWorkspace and never spawned csc, so the compiler-server env vars left its measured 3.95 GiB untouched. (Moot since ersatztv#469 switched format to dotnet format whitespace . --folder, which skips the MSBuild/Roslyn workspace entirely — the job is now a ~0.5 s, low-memory whitespace/BOM check with no Roslyn heap. See Static analysis & formatting → Formatting below.)

The same three are repeated in dependency-scan.yml; workflow env: does not cross workflow files. That one is lower-stakes (restore/list are MSBuild-driven, so it's lingering worker nodes rather than a 7.8 GB VBCSCompiler) but it runs unattended on a cron against the prod media host.

The workflow env: does not reach the build job's compilation, which happens inside docker build — the same three are set as ENV in the SDK stage of docker/Dockerfile. That is the job server-management#570 measured pegging 5.999/6 GiB, so it is the one that most needs this. Build-stage only; the final image is FROM runtime-base, so nothing lands in the shipped image.

The test job samples its own memory and reports it every run. Two steps (continue-on-error, so they never fail a build), driven by scripts/ci-peak-anon.sh (ersatztv#412):

• Start peak-anon sampler (before the dotnet Build/Test/Coverage steps) launches a detached background poller that tracks the high-water mark of the cgroup's anon memory every 2 s.
• Report peak container memory (the job's last step) stops the sampler and prints the sampled peak anon — the headline number — alongside memory.peak and the end-of-job anon/file split, to the log and the job step summary.

Read the peak anon off a recent run to size a cap — not memory.peak, and here is why:

⚠️ memory.peak is not "peak RSS". It is the high-water mark of memory.current, which charges page cache to the cgroup as well as anonymous memory. Proven on bumblebee: a container with anon=0 that merely reads an 800 MB file reports memory.peak=826 MiB, of which file=800 MiB.

This matters because the naive reading inverts the decision: page cache is reclaimed under a tighter cap, not OOM-killed, so a big peak that is mostly file is not evidence that the cap must stay high. anon is the part that actually forces an OOM. Size caps on peak anon, not on peak.

Why a sampler and not just the end-of-job split: the kernel exposes memory.peak (peak of anon+cache) but has no peak-anon counter, and the end-of-job anon is the composition then, not at the peak instant — a job that peaks mid-dotnet test and then frees reports a misleadingly low anon. The 2 s background sampler catches the true peak-anon instant; memory.peak and the end-of-job split stay in the report as a cache-inflated ceiling and a reference. (Before #412 the instrument printed only memory.peak + the end-of-job split — see #411.)

The compiler-server A/B (ersatztv#412). Measured on bumblebee in the CI toolchain image, swap-off (--memory-swap == --memory), full-solution dotnet build --no-incremental, peak anon sampled by this instrument, servers shut down between arms (n=2 each, interleaved):

Arm	shared-compilation env	peak anon (2 runs)	resident after build
OFF (the CI config)	disabled	5818 / 5854 MiB (~5.84 GiB, tight)	none
ON (dotnet defaults)	enabled	6305 / 7604 MiB (~7.0 GiB, noisy)	~3 GiB VBCSCompiler

Two things are solid: OFF is consistently ~5.84 GiB and ON is always higher (mean delta ~1.1 GiB, up to ~1.8 GiB), so disabling the servers is worth it; and ON leaves a ~3 GiB VBCSCompiler resident after the build — the host-between-jobs cost #406 removed. Don't read a precise delta into the ON peak: it is noisy because a parallel build's peak depends on how many csc/project compilations overlap at the peak instant.

#406's premise — "if disabling shared compilation brings peak RSS well under 6 GiB, the whole budget loosens" — is NOT supported. OFF sits at ~5.84 GiB for the build phase alone — right at the 6 GiB line, not well under it — and the test job adds dotnet test + coverlet + reportgenerator on top. Disabling the compiler servers stays right (consistent reduction, no 3 GiB resident server) but do not bank a looser cap budget on it: size the cap off the live test-job peak anon this instrument now reports (build + test + coverage), not off this build-only A/B.

The earlier PR #411 probe (peak 9457 / anon 7134 / file 421 MiB) read higher than these swap-off sampled numbers. Swap settings and read-method (end-of-job snapshot vs sampled peak) move these figures by >1 GiB (#406), so treat the committed instrument's sampled peak-anon as authoritative and that probe as superseded.

What is established: no persistent compiler server survives a build, migrations is green with mysql capped at 2g swap-off, and the test job now self-reports a true peak-anon every run.

services: containers are capped explicitly (ersatztv#406)

A runner's container.options (--cpus=4 --memory=10g) applies to the job container only, not to services:. Verified on a live migrations job: the job container reported HostConfig.Memory=10737418240; its mysql:8.4 service reported mem=0 nanocpus=0 — unbounded. So migrations runs added an uncapped MySQL to an already-tight host.

The mysql service now sets --memory=2g --memory-swap=2g --cpus=2.

--memory-swap is the part that matters, and it is easy to get wrong. Docker defaults an unset --memory-swap to twice --memory, so --memory=2g alone grants 2g RAM plus 2g of swap. Verified on bumblebee:

Options	memory.max	memory.swap.max
--memory=2g	2147483648	2147483648 ← 2 GiB of swap
--memory=2g --memory-swap=2g	2147483648	0 ← swap disabled

Setting --memory-swap equal to --memory disables swap for the container. On this host that is the whole point: swap thrash is what took prod down, and a swapping mysqld mid-DDL is precisely the pathology behind the known Command Timeout expired migrations flake. Prefer a loud OOM over silent swapping — an OOM is a clear signal to raise the cap; swapping just degrades everything.

⚠️ The same 2× applies to the runners' container.options: --memory=10g — each job slot is really 10 GiB RAM plus 10 GiB swap. The "6 slots × 10 GiB = 60 GiB on a 25 GiB host" framing understates the promise by 2×, and it is a plausible direct mechanism for the incident's 21 GiB of swap. Fixing that is server-management#604's call (reported there).

On the 2g figure, honestly: a mysql:8.4 container with this exact env peaked at 543 MiB during init and settled at 481 MiB idle (probed on bumblebee, 2026-07-17) — but that is init+idle, not the 787-migration replay, which grows table/definition caches idle never touches. So 2g is a measured floor plus headroom, not a measured ceiling; the migrations job going green is what validates it. --cpus=2 has no measurement behind it at all — 787 sequential DDL statements on one connection are ~1-core-bound, so it is judgement; revisit if the apply step's tail latency grows.

Any new services: container needs its own explicit cap — it will not inherit one, and it needs --memory-swap set alongside --memory or it silently gets 2× in swap.

test job

dotnet restore → strip the Scanner project ref (sed -i '/Scanner/d', matching the Docker build) → dotnet build -c Release → dotnet test -c Release --no-build. Gates the image build.

• Code coverage (ersatztv#15): dotnet test runs with --collect:"XPlat Code Coverage" --settings coverlet.runsettings --results-directory ./coverage, so coverlet.collector (referenced by every *.Tests project) emits a Cobertura report per project. A follow-up Coverage summary step merges them with ReportGenerator (TextSummary to the log, MarkdownSummaryGithub to the job step summary). No floor is enforced yet ("decide on a floor later" — #15); the step is continue-on-error: true, so a missing report or a transient tool install never blocks a build.
  • coverlet.runsettings excludes generated EF migration code (**/Migrations/*.cs, ~2.59M generated lines vs ~200k authored). Instrumenting it OOM-killed the shared test job (exit 137); excluding it cuts the instrumented surface ~126× (2.5M→20k coverable lines in the whole-solution Architecture.Tests process) and makes the percentage reflect authored code.
• Shallow checkout: fetch-depth: 2 — this job never runs git describe/git log, and only build needs full history/tags for version computation, so test, migrations and functional-e2e all check out shallow. It was 1 (ersatztv#190) until ersatztv#420's revalidate step needed HEAD^2 to resolve on a main merge commit. build's checkout stays fetch-depth: 0.
• NuGet package cache: both test and migrations cache ~/.nuget/packages via actions/cache@v4, keyed on hashFiles('Directory.Packages.props', 'global.json') with a restore-keys OS-level fallback (ersatztv#190). Avoids a from-scratch dotnet restore on every run; the key only changes when the central package manifest or SDK pin changes.

build job

1. Compute INFO_VERSION (git describe + short sha on main; tag version on v*).
2. docker/setup-buildx-action with buildkitd-config-inline setting http = true for 192.168.1.95:3000 — BuildKit does not inherit the host daemon's insecure-registries, so without this, cache/base-image/push over the HTTP registry fails (http: server gave HTTP response to HTTPS client).
3. docker/login-action with repo secrets REGISTRY_USER / REGISTRY_PASSWORD. REGISTRY_PASSWORD is a scoped PAT (write:package + read:repository), not an account password — deliberately, so head-resolved PR code cannot use it to forge a commit status (ci.actions-credential-scoping, ersatztv#697). If a job ever fails with token does not have at least one of required scope(s), the fix is to narrow what the job does, never to widen the token to write:repository or to put the admin password back. Note what the scope still reaches: write:package covers ersatztv:prod (the tag prod's stack follows) and ersatztv-ci:<sha> (the toolchain image five container: jobs execute), so this is the deployment supply chain, not an inert endpoint — see ci.actions-credential-scoping.
4. docker/build-push-action@v6: amd64-only, docker/Dockerfile, INFO_VERSION build-arg, registry layer cache (type=registry,ref=…:buildcache, cache-to … ignore-error=true).
5. Smoke + IPTV E2E test: pull the just-pushed :<sha>, run it, poll for HTTP readiness (docker exec … python3 → http://localhost:8409/), then assert the real Jellyfin-facing surfaces on the freshly built image (ersatztv#16): /iptv/channels.m3u returns 2xx containing #EXTM3U, and /iptv/xmltv.xml returns 2xx containing a <tv root. xmltv.xml needs channels.xml (written by the scheduler a few seconds after boot), so each endpoint is polled with a deadline. Unique container name + trap … EXIT cleanup; dumps container logs on failure. Catches routing / base-URL (#1) / migration regressions that leave the app "up" but serving broken output.

functional-e2e job (advisory; PR + main)

Boots the app from source and drives the manual live-E2E curl flows sessions have historically re-run by hand, turning them into a CI regression net (ersatztv#299). It is the automatable half of docs/e2e-local.md; every script it chains runs identically locally and in CI:

1. npm ci + npm run build (SPA), dotnet build ErsatzTV.sln -c Release. (ffmpeg comes from the CI toolchain image; the old apt-get install ffmpeg step is gone — see below.)
2. ETV_BUILD_CONFIG=Release scripts/e2e-local.sh <fresh-config> — copies wwwroot, launches dotnet ErsatzTV.dll in the background (logging to a file so the launch step returns once the app is ready), prints PID/CONFIG_DIR.
3. scripts/e2e-functional.sh http://localhost:8409 <config> — asserts. Mostly curl-only: the legacy→SPA redirect sweep (+ the /api, /artwork never-redirect exemption), the auth/CSRF/security-stamp flow (setup-claim → read-gate 401/200 → re-claim 409 → CSRF 403 → login 401/200 → logout 403/204 → post-logout stamp-revocation 401), the library-scan status contract (404 unknown / 202 queued / scan-status 200), and the If-Match/412 round-trip on rerun-collections. Since ersatztv#363 (extended by #444) it also asserts three lock-contention 409s that aren't curl-only — see below. A trap kills the instance on step exit.
4. ETV_UI_PORT=8410 scripts/e2e-ui.sh — boots a second, fresh instance and runs the headless Playwright UI flows (ersatztv#445). See "UI-E2E step" below.

Lock-contention 409s (ersatztv#363). The harness now seeds rows the API can't create — a LibraryPath and a Jellyfin media-source — directly into the running instance's SQLite DB (via python3's stdlib sqlite3, whose busy-timeout retry serializes behind the app's writer), and synthesizes media with the image's ffmpeg, to exercise two IEntityLocker contracts deterministically (it only fires the racing request once the lock is provably held, never a sleep-and-hope): (a) the library-scan "already scanning" 409 — seed ~60 tiny clips into the built-in Shows library so the scanner subprocess runs a few seconds, poll GET /libraries/scan-status until the library shows active (that window is a strict subset of the scan lock's held window), then a second POST .../scan is a 409 (deterministic bar a tiny residual TOCTOU gap the multi-second scan covers); (b) the external-collections "already scanning" 409 — the per-family lock is taken synchronously before the 202, so the 202 proves it held, and pointing the seeded source at a non-routable address keeps the background sync hung so the window stays open; and (c) the playout-build "build in progress" 409 + isLocked projection (#215/#444) — a build is enqueued onto the single-consumer WorkerService and the trigger returns before the handler locks, so poll GET /playouts/{id} until isLocked:true (not the accepted trigger), then fire. Seed a Classic Flood schedule over a few short episodes and crank PlayoutDaysToBuild (playout.days_to_build) so one build is wide enough to observe (~5 days ≈ 43k items ≈ ~1s locally, wider on slower CI); assert PUT /playouts/{id} 409, POST .../playout/reset 409, the list isLocked:true, then post-build the same PUT 200s. No new CI step or dependency: ffmpeg ships in the toolchain image, and python3 was already a harness dependency (json_field). The scan + build flows self-skip (advisory) if ffmpeg is ever absent, and the build flow also self-skips if the build is never observed locked (never asserts an unproven race).

Advisory, by design (the issue's "keep it a separate job so a functional-E2E flake can't block the unit-test gate"): it is not a needs: of build and not (yet) a required check, so a flake blocks nothing. Promote it to a required check / build dependency once it's proven reliable — the same staged rollout the migrations job used. SQLite is the default provider, so unlike migrations it needs no DB service container. Runs on PRs and on main (regression net); skipped for v* tag builds. The playout-build lock 409 + isLocked projection (#215) landed in #444.

UI-E2E step (ersatztv#445). The last step of this same job (item 4 in the summary above; the Run UI-E2E Playwright flows (headless) entry in the YAML) runs the headless-browser flows the curl harness structurally cannot express — client-side form validation, AuthGate's rendered states, the session cookie authenticating the SPA's own /api XHRs, and sign-out via the UserMenu:

ETV_BUILD_CONFIG=Release ETV_UI_PORT=8410 scripts/e2e-ui.sh

e2e-ui.sh owns the lifecycle (fresh config dir → boot → playwright test → always kill the server) and exits with Playwright's status. Three deliberate choices:

• This job, not a new one. The dominant cost here is npm ci + the Release build, both already done; a separate job would duplicate them to add ~5s of browser work. The browser is baked into the toolchain image, so the step installs nothing.
• Its own fresh instance on port 8410. The first spec asserts the one-shot Setup gate, which step 3's auth section has already claimed on its config dir; a separate port also keeps this step independent of step 3's teardown timing.
• retries: 0, serial, single worker. #445 asked for deterministic flows and a retry would let a flaky flow merge looking green (measured: 4 consecutive clean runs, ~2s each). Full rationale and the rule for extending the suite: docs/e2e-local.md → "UI-E2E harness".

Docs-only skip (ersatztv#416)

A change that touches only docs/** or *.md (anywhere: README.md, CLAUDE.md, handoff files) has nothing for the heavy jobs to validate. Before this, such a change ran the entire matrix — test, migrations (with its mysql:8.4 service), functional-e2e, format, api-docs — ~9 min of warm CI for a Markdown edit.

The mechanism, and why it is shaped this way. Each heavy job (test, migrations, functional-e2e, build) runs scripts/ci-detect-docs-only.sh as its first post-checkout step (id: detect), which emits docs_only=true|false to $GITHUB_OUTPUT. Every real step in the job is gated if: steps.detect.outputs.docs_only != 'true'. On a docs-only change the job runs only checkout + detect and reports success in seconds.

Shallow-checkout safe (the change-set diff). test, migrations and functional-e2e all check out shallow (fetch-depth: 2), and a shallow clone has no origin/<base> tracking ref and no merge-base — so a three-dot origin/main...HEAD diff errors, the fail-safe returns docs_only=false, and the skip silently never fires (this bug shipped once — every docs-only PR still ran the full matrix; caught by #416's "verify on a real PR" box). The script therefore fetches the base and diffs against FETCH_HEAD (always written by git fetch, resolves in a shallow clone) with a two-dot tree diff (git diff --no-renames FETCH_HEAD HEAD) — no merge-base required. (api-docs/format avoided the bug only because they check out fetch-depth: 0.)

The jobs are not if:-skipped. That is deliberate and it is the whole trap of this issue:

• main's branch protection requires two checks by name — Build ErsatzTV Image / Build & test (.NET) (pull_request) and Build ErsatzTV Image / EF migration integrity (SQLite + MySql) (pull_request). If a docs-only PR produced no run for those (a workflow-level paths-ignore, or an if:-skipped job), those contexts would never report and the PR could never merge — the naive fix bricks docs PRs rather than speeding them up.
• On Gitea 1.25.4 an if:-skipped job reports commit-status state skipped, a distinct state (verified with a throwaway probe, PR #418) — not success. Still true on 1.27.1 (re-confirmed 2026-08-28, ersatztv#747, from production PR heads rather than a new probe PR). We do not rely on how branch protection treats a skipped required context. Keeping the job running and gating its steps makes the required context report success unconditionally, which is safe by construction.
• Non-required jobs may skip freely: production already proves a skipped non-required context does not block merge (build is skipped on every PR). So build skips its image steps on a docs-only push to main (docs are not in the image, so there is nothing to rebuild); tag builds force docs_only=false in the script so a release is never skipped.

The detection biases toward running more: docs_only=true only when every changed path is docs; any code path, a tag build, a non-merge push, or an undeterminable diff resolves to false (run the full matrix). A false true would skip real tests on a code change — a correctness bug — so every ambiguous case runs everything. The migrations job's mysql service still starts on a docs-only run (a services: container starts with the job regardless of step if:), but the expensive 787-migration replay is skipped; the service is capped and idle for seconds.

api-docs and format already short-circuit on docs-only changes via their own path detection (no API path / no .cs changed → they pass in ~5s), so they needed no change. docs-reminder, decisions-guard, ci-image-pin and script-tests keep running on docs-only changes — the first two are about docs and must, and script-tests is unconditional by design (ersatztv#631).

Not in scope: the within-run triple dotnet build (ersatztv#398; measured and rejected as build-once — see docs/decisions.md). The separate redundancy of running the whole matrix on a PR and again on the merge-to-main over identical code (ersatztv#420) is addressed below.

Cross-run tree-identity skip (ersatztv#420)

A merge to main re-runs the entire matrix over code the PR's last run already validated — the same redundancy as docs-only, but for identical code rather than docs. On a push to main that is a real merge commit, test/migrations/functional-e2e each run scripts/ci-detect-already-validated.sh as a second detect step (id: revalidate, right after the docs-only detect), and every heavy step gains an added && steps.revalidate.outputs.skip != 'true' to its existing if:.

Skip condition — all four required, else fail-safe skip=false:

• the event is a push to refs/heads/main;
• HEAD has a second parent HEAD^2 (a real merge commit — the PR head CI already validated; squash, rebase, fast-forward, or a direct push have no HEAD^2, so they run);
• git rev-parse HEAD^{tree} equals HEAD^2^{tree} — main did not advance since the PR's last run, a byte-identical tree;
• HEAD^2 has a green Gitea combined commit status, queried via the API with ETV_STATUS_AUTH. Trusting the aggregate .state is sound: a skipped context does not drag the combined state below success (verified live against this instance — a real merge commit with four skipped PR-only contexts still reported .state == success), and the two required jobs never report skipped (they always run and report a real success/failure), so .state == success implies they were green.

Those three jobs check out fetch-depth: 2 so HEAD^2 and its tree resolve.

Why it's safe: build is not gated. The three heavy jobs skip their steps (same required-context reasoning as docs-only — they still run and report success in seconds), but build always runs on main, ungated, building and pushing the image from that identical, already-validated tree. No image ships from unvalidated source. The required contexts are unchanged (Build & test (.NET), EF migration integrity (SQLite + MySql)) — no branch-protection change.

Fail-safe bias. Any uncertainty — not a main push, no HEAD^2, a differing tree, a missing/failing/non-success status, missing auth — resolves to skip=false and runs the full matrix. A false skip could ship an under-validated image, so every ambiguous case runs everything.

Honest limitation — this fires rarely here, by design. The tree is identical only on a fast-forward-equivalent merge: main did not advance since the PR's last green run and the PR head was not rebased at merge time. Two routine patterns defeat it in this repo: (1) under parallel merges main usually advances; and (2) — the bigger one — the standard workflow rebases a PR before merging to resolve the docs/decisions.md lifecycle conflict (see MEMORY: the "decisions.md conflict treadmill"), which mints a new head SHA whose tree was never itself CI-validated, so the tree-match check correctly declines. So the skip is a genuine but occasional win (clean, up-to-date, un-rebased merges in quiet periods) — correct-but-conservative by construction, not a general dedup. It never fires unsafely; when in doubt it runs the full matrix.

Dropped-step guard on the required jobs (ersatztv#756)

test and migrations write the only two docker-build.yml contexts branch protection requires on main. A step the runner declines to interpolate is dropped, and the job still concludes success (ersatztv#751), so in these two jobs that failure is fail-OPEN: a required check reports green having done no work. In review-verdict.yml the same drop is fail-closed — the status is simply absent and the merge is blocked — which is why #751 fixed the safe direction first.

Two independent mechanisms hold it, and neither is redundant:

• A static ban on expression delimiters in any run: body of test, migrations and build. The drop mechanism requires an opener in the scalar, so this makes the class unreachable rather than merely detected — and it is the raw ${{ opener that is banned, not a well-formed pair, because an unclosed one triggers the same rewrite. When a step genuinely needs a value, pass it through the step's env: block, which is interpolated per value, so a bad payload there cannot take the body with it.

  Why build is in the ban although it is not a required context. Its one delimiter-bearing body was Smoke + IPTV E2E, which runs after Build and push — so on a v* tag the image is already in the registry as the release candidate and that step is what decides whether the candidate was ever booted. A drop there publishes an unsmoked candidate, reports green, and DeployStack jazz-media promotes exactly that image. Its two payloads moved into the step's env:, so the ban cost nothing.

  The ban is re-checked on the release path itself (ersatztv#767). It used to be enforced only by the script-tests job, which lives in pr-checks.yml (on: pull_request) and is not a required context — a review-time check on the PR that would introduce a delimiter, not a gate on the release. pr-checks.yml does not run on a v* tag push at all, so a delimiter that ever reached main would still drop Smoke on the tag build and go green; main being PR-only (#743) meant such a change had to pass through a PR where script-tests reddens, but a red on a non-required check does not block the merge server-side.

  There is now a scan job (Delimiter ban (release path)) that runs the PyYAML-based ban test, and build lists it in needs:. That single edge is the fail-closed property: a red scan means build is skipped outright, so the image is never built, let alone pushed.

  Why a job and not a step inside build. A step cannot protect the job it lives in. build is what publishes, so a guard step there fails open if the runner drops it — and the defence ("the guard's own body has no opener, so it cannot be dropped") is circular when the only thing enforcing that property is the same PR-only test being backstopped. That was the first design, and it was rejected for exactly that.

  Why it runs the real pytest and not a bespoke scanner. The same first cut hand-parsed the workflow YAML in stdlib Python, to avoid provisioning PyYAML on build's bare runner. That parser yielded ~10 false negatives in one round — flow mappings ({run: …}), a quoted "run": key, aliases, multiline quoted scalars — making it strictly weaker than the check it backstopped, in the only direction that matters for a security gate. Running the existing test needs no second definition of "what is a run: body", so it has no drift surface at all. scan runs on small and provisions Python the same way script-tests does.

  The wiring is held by scripts/tests/test_ci_release_path_scan_job.py — build depends on it, it carries no job-level if: (one that excluded the tag push would restore the hole; one that skipped the job would skip build too), no step is continue-on-error, and every one of its own run: bodies is delimiter-free. Its steps also carry #756 markers and a trailing assert, so a drop inside this job is caught as well.

  The gate's guarantee is one execution probe, not a set of assertions about the command: it runs the scan step's real run: body — with the workflow, job and step env: tiers layered as the runner would — against a copy of the repo whose Smoke body carries an injected delimiter, and requires a non-zero exit, with a clean-tree negative control. Shape assertions were tried twice and lost twice (nine disarms across two rounds, from echoing the command to PYTEST_ADDOPTS one env tier up), so do not replace the probe with cheaper checks about the command. One tier is unreachable by any static reconstruction — a step writing to $GITHUB_ENV injects into later steps at runtime — and is therefore banned in this job rather than modelled.

  And one check deliberately is not a test at all. The tests above prove the ban holds; they cannot prove it would notice, because pytest's own configuration outranks them — a repo-root pytest.ini with addopts = -k "not delimiter_banned", or a conftest.py with pytest_collection_modifyitems, deselects the ban test and every test guarding it, leaving the whole suite green with a delimiter sitting in Smoke. So scan's last working step runs scripts/ci-prove-ban-detects.sh, which poisons the checked-out workflow, re-runs the ban test, and requires the ban test's build parametrisation to be the failure. Not "the same command" (the step also runs the wiring tests; the script runs only the ban file) and not merely "fails if it passes": any other outcome — exit 5 because everything was deselected, exit 2 on a collection error, or a failure in some unrelated test — is a refusal, not a pass. That exhaustiveness is the load-bearing part, because each weaker reading was a live bug here: "non-zero means it noticed" vouched for the gate on a collection error, and the deselection disarm this script exists to catch exits 5, not 1.

  It runs in the real checkout — an isolated copy does not inherit the repo-root config a disarm would live in, so a copy-based run reports healthy while the real invocation is deselected — which has happened here. The workflow file is restored by an EXIT trap, and the step carries a selfcheck marker so dropping it reddens the job.

  Two further tests exist because review disarmed the gate in ways an obvious test misses. The pytest invocation is checked as a command, not as a substring: the ban test's path must appear as a bare token on the real python3 -m pytest line, that line may carry none of -k/-m/--deselect/--ignore/--collect-only, and its exit status may not be swallowed by ||/&&/;/|. Commenting the invocation out and echoing instead, or appending -k 'not delimiter_banned', each left the suite green with the release path unguarded. And the ban's SCOPE is pinned — DELIMITER_BAN_JOBS must still contain build, because dropping that one literal makes scan pass while checking nothing about the job that publishes the image.

  Two operational notes. scan is a small-lane job on the tag path, which ersatztv#535 moved away from after such jobs wedged in act's setup phase on the v26.12.0 tag; that is safe again only because server-management#639 took build off the lane. If it ever returns, move scan to ubuntu-latest — never weaken the needs: edge. And scan installs from PyPI, so a network blip now sits between a v* tag and its image; fail-closed and loud, but real.

  What this does not claim: that no step can ever fail to run for a reason other than the interpolation drop. It moves the terminal assumption — to fail open you must now drop the pytest step and the assert step, rather than either one alone.

  Measuring a guard on this path does not require cutting a release: build runs on every push to main (if: github.event_name != 'pull_request'), and a workflow_dispatch on any other ref runs the job while Build and push publishes nothing (its push: is gated on main/v*). That is how #767 was verified — see the decision record for the run ids.

  functional-e2e is delimiter-free too but is deliberately not banned: it is advisory by declaration, and the rule is "ban where a drop is consequential", not "ban wherever it is currently free". api-docs and format keep one github.base_ref each in a detect step and gate nothing that ships.

• Runtime per-step markers, for a step that fails to run for any other reason. Every run: step that is not continue-on-error: true calls "$GITHUB_WORKSPACE/scripts/ci-step-ran.sh" mark <key> as its first act, and the job's last step calls ci-step-ran.sh assert --always … --gated …, which fails the job when an expected key was never recorded.

Per step, not per job. A marker written by the first step only proves the job began, which was never in doubt. The drop that costs something is Test, Build or a migration replay — all well past step one — so a job-level marker would have been a guard that cannot see the case it exists for.

The guard carries no if:, and that is deliberate. The #751 guard uses if: always() because its job has one real step. These have a dozen, and a genuine failure in an early step legitimately skips every later one — an always() guard would then announce a false "these steps never executed: typecheck web-test build dotnet-test" on top of every ordinary red build, and a guard that cries wolf gets deleted. (migrations is smaller — six marked steps — but the same argument applies, and its guard comment is worded for its own keys rather than copied from test's.) The default if: is success(), which is the wanted condition, and the invariant that makes relying on it safe rather than lucky is: the guard is skipped only when an earlier step failed, and that already fails the job. So guard skipped ⇒ job red, and every path to a green job runs the guard. A dropped step is invisible precisely because it concludes success — which keeps the job green and therefore reaches the guard.

That invariant has one path where it could plausibly be false and where being wrong would be silent: a step marked continue-on-error: true that FAILS. If that flipped success(), the guard would be skipped on a job that still concluded green — the guard rendered a no-op by exactly the failure mode it exists to catch, with no signal. The test job has three continue-on-error steps and two of them sit immediately before the guard, so this is a live path, not a theoretical one. Measured (scratch PR #766, run 1913 job 8075): the last advisory step was made to exit 1, the log carries ❌ Failure - Main Report peak container memory, and the guard still ran, reported All 12 expected step(s) executed, and the job concluded success. A failing continue-on-error step does not flip success() on this runner, so the invariant holds where it mattered most. That run is also the test job's full twelve-key positive control on the build lane.

Adding a step to either job? Mark it, and add its key to that job's guard list in the right bucket (--always for the two detect steps, --gated for anything carrying the docs-only / already-validated if:). scripts/tests/test_ci_dropped_step_guard.py derives the expected set from the workflow, so an unmarked step or a bucket mismatch is a red — it does not rely on anyone remembering. One caveat, since this section is careful about it elsewhere: that red is script-tests, the same non-required, PR-only check discussed above. For the delimiter ban on test/migrations that hardly matters, because the runtime guard is the fail-closed backstop — but a newly added, unmarked step is caught by the static test alone, since the runtime guard cannot expect a key nobody declared.

The marker path is keyed on job + run id + attempt — and be precise about why, because the obvious justification is a #751 measurement that does not transfer. #751 found RUNNER_TEMP to be /tmp and called it "not a private per-job directory", but that was taken on review-verdict.yml, which runs without a container:. These two jobs run inside the CI toolchain image, so their /tmp is the job container's own and starts empty. The fresh container is therefore what actually rules out a stale marker here; the keying is defence in depth against a lane change nobody would think to re-check this against. GITHUB_JOB and GITHUB_RUN_ID are measured present and the script refuses without them rather than falling back to a name other runs share. GITHUB_RUN_ATTEMPT is required too — but how that was established is the part worth keeping, because the first two attempts at it were both worthless. Grepping a job log for the variable name proves nothing: logs do not dump the environment. Inferring it from the absence of the script's "not set" warning proves nothing either, because that warning goes to stderr, and whether step stderr reaches a job log here was itself never established — the control offered for that turned out to be an ::error:: line this script writes to stdout. So the script was made to report its resolved identity on stdout, where capture is not in question, and the answer was simply read off this change's own run: Marker identity: job=test run=1916 attempt=1 (from the runner), and the same for migrations. Both required jobs, on the lane that matters.

That measurement is what promoted it from warn-and-default to required, and it is what rules out a rerun inheriting attempt 1's markers. The identity line stays, as the standing evidence a future reader checks first if the keying is ever doubted again.

The premise was re-measured on the build lane. The whole thing rests on the runner still executing a later step after dropping an earlier one. #751 established that on the small lane; these jobs run in a container: on ubuntu-latest, so it was measured there rather than assumed — scratch PR #765 (Gitea 1.27.1, 2026-08-10) reintroduced the exact #751 defect in the test job's revalidate step. Recorded outcome (job test, run 1910, 20:03:49→20:13:31Z — a full 9m42s heavy run, so Build and Test really executed):

• Unable to interpolate expression 'format('# PROBE ONLY … {0}\n…', pr number)' at 20:04:06 — the step was dropped, exactly as #751 describes, and it reported conclusion success.
• Every other marked step still ran — eleven markers were recorded, ten of them AFTER the drop (restore npm-ci check-api lint typecheck web-test web-build strip-scanner build dotnet-test), detect being the eleventh and earlier. The premise holds on this lane.
• The guard ran at 20:13:29, reported These steps of job 'test' never executed: revalidate, and was the only ❌ in the entire job log — every other step succeeded. Without it this run would have concluded success having never executed that step, which is precisely the fail-open being closed.
• Incidental but kept: the dropped step's output arrived as ETV_REVALIDATE_SKIP: empty, not false — the case the guard must read as "widen what is required", never as a skip.

The positive control is the same run's migrations job, which the probe did not touch: it marked all six steps, the guard reported All 6 expected step(s) executed: detect revalidate restore build sqlite mysql, and the job concluded success. So one run demonstrates both directions on the build lane — a drop caught and reddened, and a clean job passing. The twelve-step test positive control is this change's own CI run.

Full rationale: docs/decisions/records/ci/required-job-step-execution-markers.md.

docs-reminder job (non-blocking, PR-only — in pr-checks.yml)

Two lightweight nudges, both ::warning::-only. Neither can fail the build — they are reminders, not gates; prose-doc gates get gamed with token edits.

1. The parity-doc reminder enforces the CLAUDE.md "docs-update is part of done" rule for the one case that's easy to forget and easy to detect: a PR that touches a SPA screen (web/src/screens/*.tsx) or ErsatzTV/LegacyUiRedirects.cs but does not update docs/blazor-route-parity.md. It diffs the PR against its base branch and emits a ::warning:: annotation.

2. The session-narrative reminder (ersatztv#784) runs scripts/check-doc-narrative.py --diff over the lines this PR adds to docs/**/*.md (minus docs/decisions/**, exempt wholesale), root-level *.md, and — since ersatztv#876 — every tracked file under .claude/, .gitea/, .husky/ and scripts/ regardless of extension (minus the detector and its own test, whose fixtures are the phrasings), flagging text that narrates the artifact's own revision history — docs.no-session-narrative. It is advisory by design and permanently: a narrative detector is a string predicate over prose, the class docs/defect-shapes-773.md §4 argues must never be load-bearing, so the script exits 0 on every path including a bad argument or an unresolvable base ref. It does NOT rest on prose alone, and it does not rest wholly on tests either: the record's COVERAGE BOUNDARY names which clauses carry a mutation proof and which are defensive and unproven (the unhandled-exception arm among them). Every argument shape is asserted per shape in scripts/tests/test_check_doc_narrative.py rather than only in prose. When it cannot resolve the base it prints SCANNED NOTHING instead of a clean-looking line, because a silent zero-file scan is indistinguishable from a clean one — the same failure ci.required-job-step-execution-markers exists for.

Because this step needs an interpreter, the job DOES carry actions/setup-python — the one exception to the no-setup-actions note below, since python3 is not guaranteed on the bare small lane. It, the script step and the parity-doc step above it all carry continue-on-error: true: a script that exits 0 does not by itself keep the JOB green, a setup-action download failure would redden an advisory check just as effectively as a hit would, and the parity step's base-ref fetch fails loudly (ersatztv#746) — which must reach the log without reddening a warn-only job. Checkout is the one step left blocking.

The job deliberately has no setup-dotnet/setup-node (and thus no actions/cache), so it can't hit the cache-save hangs seen on the VM-127 runner (server-management#570). It does not cover the remaining doc obligations in the CLAUDE.md table (domain-model, spa-conventions) — those stay on the author. (The API contract is mechanized by the blocking api-docs job, and docs/decisions.md by the blocking decisions-guard job below.)

decisions-guard job (decisions lifecycle, blocking, PR-only — in pr-checks.yml)

Enforces decision-record lifecycle invariants (ersatztv#521, supersedes the ersatztv#303 H9 append-only mechanic): well-formed 5-field metadata, exactly one active record per key, reciprocal supersedes/superseded-by links, no record vanishing from the active set without an archive copy, no rationale-prose rewrite without a Decisions-Edit: yes trailer on a non-merge commit in the range (ersatztv#609), a structural per-path check that every *.md under docs/decisions/records/** and docs/decisions/archive/** parses to exactly one keyed record (ersatztv#621 — without it, a file the dependency-free frontmatter reader cannot parse, such as one using a YAML block scalar, yields [] and vanishes from the corpus with every check still reporting green; a file directly in archive/ is exempt only when it really is a stripped index — one keyless record with a known generated heading — never merely by its location; the single further exemption, archive/README.md, is by exact relative path, never by basename, which would otherwise exempt the same filename in the active wing), and the generated active catalog (docs/decisions/README.md) in sync with source. Two steps: scripts/decisions_validate.py --base origin/<base> --head HEAD (the merge-base diff checks, which need a base/head range — CI-only) and scripts/build_decisions_catalog.py --check (catalog drift). The same validator backs the Husky pre-commit hook (.claude/hooks/decisions-guard.sh, no base/head there — structural checks only, over the working tree), so local and CI enforcement can't drift on the rules that don't need a range. python3 isn't guaranteed on the bare small lane, so the job adds actions/setup-python@v5 before invoking it; that install is lightweight (no compiler/docker build), so it doesn't violate the "small is git-only" lane rule. Like docs-reminder, otherwise a seconds-long git diff + parse with no dotnet/node setup (runs-on: small).

prove-fix job (Fix proofs (Proves trailers), PR-only — in pr-checks.yml)

Runs scripts/prove-fix.sh for every commit in the PR that carries a Proves: <pytest selector> trailer, and fails the PR if a claimed proof does not hold. The rule and its rationale are testing.fix-ships-a-witnessed-red-test; this section is the CI-side contract.

Opt-in by trailer, enforced when present. Requiring Proves: on every commit would block docs, CI and refactor commits that have no code side to revert, and a gate that blocks ordinary work gets switched off — which is how a check ends up running nowhere (ersatztv#631). So the trailer is the author's claim and this job checks claims. When a PR carries none, the job emits a ::notice:: saying it asserted nothing — its green must not be read as fix coverage.

It needs full history (fetch-depth: 0): the script reverts each commit against its PARENT, and a shallow clone cannot resolve <sha>^.

Three refusals worth knowing before you write a trailer:

• a merge commit is rejected — several parents means "the code before this change" is ambiguous; put the trailer on the commit carrying the fix;
• more than one Proves: trailer is rejected — only the first would be checked, so the rest would read as proven without ever running (the job checks this itself, because passing the selector explicitly bypasses the script's own guard);
• a test-only commit is rejected — there is no code side to revert.

Only pytest exit 1 counts as red. 2 is an interrupted collection, 3 internal, 4 usage, 5 nothing collected, 143 a signal; --continue-on-collection-errors converts a genuine collection failure to 1 so add-a-file fixes stay provable. The job inherits that. Note the direction: a wobble DOES redden this job (prove-fix.sh exits 5 on a harness/git failure or a signal, and the job turns that into an error), so what the exit-code discipline buys is the other way round — a green here means a claim was witnessed, never that a run was cancelled or broke.

script-tests job (Script lint and tests (ruff + pytest), PR-only — in pr-checks.yml)

Reddens the run on failure, but like the other pr-checks.yml gates it is not one of the three required status checks on main (Build & test (.NET), EF migration integrity, review-verdict/h10). Promoting it to required is a branch-protection change, tracked separately.

Runs the repository's Python test suite: PYTHONPATH=. python3 -m pytest scripts/tests -q (773 tests at 706674272, ~4.5 min; the suite grows fast — it was ~190 tests / ~10s when this job landed in #631 — so treat the figure as a dated snapshot, not a budget). It covers the decision-corpus parser/validator/catalog builder, the ersatztv#610 migration-equivalence harness, the merge-consent exemption logic and the ersatztv#622 review-verdict poster.

Until ersatztv#631, nothing ran these tests. No workflow and no Husky hook invoked pytest. decisions-guard executes decisions_validate.py and build_decisions_catalog.py directly — it exercises that code but never its tests — and the test job is dotnet test only. The suite guarding our merge-gating machinery was therefore local-only, and a test added "for CI enforcement" was decorative.

Why it is its own job, not a step inside decisions-guard. decisions-guard is covered by the standing ci.decisions-lifecycle-flake rule: a lone decisions lifecycle red is a known infra flake and sessions are instructed not to investigate it. Adding the suite there would make a genuine pytest regression surface as precisely the red everyone is told to wave through — the same "reports success while doing nothing" failure mode ersatztv#631 exists to close. A distinct job name keeps a real failure unambiguous.

Why it runs unconditionally rather than behind a scripts/** path filter: the suite's true input set spans AT LEAST three top-level directories. test_post_review_verdict.py and test_merge_consent_exemption.py execute the real scripts/post-review-verdict.sh and .claude/hooks/pretooluse-merge-consent.sh, and since ersatztv#845 the former also READS .gitea/workflows/review-verdict.yml, because the writer derives the H10 allow-list from it and editing that literal changes the suite's outcome. So a scripts/** filter would silently miss a .claude/hooks/** or .gitea/workflows/** edit. The hedge is deliberate: the corpus tests read docs/ too, so the real figure is higher, and an exact count here is the kind that goes stale. The reason is the input set, not the cost: the suite was ~10s when that was decided and is now minutes, and it would still be wrong to filter on scripts/**.

It also lints (ersatztv#780). Early in the job it installs a pinned ruff==0.12.11 and runs ruff check and ruff format --check against the repo-root ruff.toml. Five things are deliberate:

• The config is committed. Without it ruff falls back to whatever ~/.config/ruff/ruff.toml the operator's machine has, so a second machine lints this repo differently or not at all.
• The version is pinned — an unpinned install makes the verdict a function of when the job ran, the same divergence one layer up, and the same argument as the jq pin below. pytest/pyyaml stay unpinned on purpose: a pytest release does not add assertions to your suite, a ruff release adds rules to your lint.
• Lint runs before the jq preflight, and after the git one. Preflight jq version is a hard --expect tripwire; a lint sitting behind it goes dark for as long as the jq contract is broken, under a red that says "jq". Preflight external tools stays ahead, because the lint steps consume git — without it a missing git reaches them as an empty population and they blame the glob.
• Neither step is ruff check .. Both pass an explicit population from git ls-files -z '*.py' '*.pyi' '*.ipynb' with --no-force-exclude, and fail if that list is empty. Discovery-based invocation is silently emptied by an exclude in the right config scope — top level empties both commands, [lint] empties check, [format] empties format --check (and [format] is where an appended line lands) — and ruff check . over zero files exits 0 with only a stderr warning, so the failure mode is a green gate. The measured matrix is in ci.python-lint-ruff-config-committed.
• RUF100 is selected, so a # noqa that no longer matches anything is itself a finding.

pyright is not gated; the reasoning and the exemption list are in ci.python-lint-ruff-config-committed.

Dependencies: pytest and pyyaml — the complete third-party set across scripts/, established by an AST import scan rather than by reading the files that looked relevant. PyYAML does not contradict the dependency-free decisions read path: decisions_lib._read_frontmatter is hand-written exactly so validation runs where nothing is installed, but the one-shot write path migrate_decisions_split.py uses PyYAML by design, and test_migration_equivalence.py imports that module. (The first cut of this job claimed "pure stdlib + pytest", passed locally on a machine that happened to have PyYAML installed, and went red in CI on a ModuleNotFoundError at collection — which is itself a small demonstration of why the suite needed to run in CI at all.) Like the other small-lane Python jobs it adds actions/setup-python@v5 first. Checkout is at default depth: every git call in the suite runs against a temp repo it creates itself, never this repository's history.

Two preflight steps run before the suite. The first asserts git is on PATH; the second runs scripts/jq-preflight.sh --expect 1.6, which checks jq's version, not merely its presence (see "The jq contract" below). Those two tests exec the real shell scripts, which shell out to jq ~26 times; the tests shim curl on PATH but not jq, so a runner image without it would surface as ~20 opaque assertion failures instead of one diagnosis. Both deliberately check rather than install — ersatztv#390 removed run-time apt-get from CI; the fix for a genuine miss is to bake the tool into the runner image.

The jq contract (ersatztv#648)

Full rationale: docs/decisions/records/ci/jq-version-contract.md.

Every shell gate in this repo — decisions-guard, script-tests's own harness, pretooluse-merge-consent.sh, review-verdict.yml, scripts/pr-changed-files.sh — is authored and tested on a developer Mac shipping jq 1.8.x. The CI runner ships jq 1.6. Author to the 1.6-compatible subset; three concrete constructs diverge between the two and each one produced a real bug when it hit CI for the first time:

• jq -e over EMPTY input. Exits 4 on jq >= 1.7, but 0 on jq 1.6. A guard that infers "transport failure" from that exit status silently passes an empty/failed page on 1.6.
• contains("\u0000") (or any NUL literal). The NUL escape truncates to "" on jq 1.6, so the containment test is vacuously true for every string, not just ones containing a NUL. Use explode | index(0) instead — it is version-stable.
• Parse-error exit code. jq empty exits 5 on jq >= 1.7 but 4 on jq 1.6 — the same code 1.6 uses for "no output produced". Reading that exit code as a specific failure mode conflates garbage input with an empty-but-valid response.

scripts/jq-preflight.sh makes the running version observable in every gate job's log (it prints the parsed version and asserts a floor of 1.6) so a future divergence can be diagnosed from the log alone instead of guessing at the runner image.

Pin vs floor is deliberately asymmetric. scripts/jq-preflight.sh --expect 1.6 additionally pins the version and fails loudly if it drifts, but that mode is used only by script-tests (.gitea/workflows/pr-checks.yml) — advisory, not a required check. review-verdict.yml runs the no-args floor-only mode and never pins, because that workflow writes review-verdict/h10, the branch-protection-required status check on main: a hard pin there would mean the day the runner's jq version changes (a base-image bump, a host reimage — nothing this repo controls), every PR on main stops merging until someone notices and re-pins. A required merge gate cannot fail because an upstream package manager did its job. The narrower pin on script-tests exists precisely because that job is the suite's only 1.6 coverage — if the runner's jq silently changed, that coverage would evaporate with no signal, so failing loudly there forces a human decision instead.

Baking a pinned jq into docker/ci/Dockerfile was considered and rejected: review-verdict.yml is runs-on: small with no toolchain-image pin, and per ci.small-lane-git-only the small lane is git-only, so it gets the host's jq regardless of what the toolchain image contains — a pin in the image provably cannot reach the gate that broke. This was checked against the running binary, not assumed.

PR gates workflow

File: .gitea/workflows/pr-checks.yml — on: pull_request only.

The five PR gates — ci-image-pin, docs-reminder, decisions-guard, script-tests, and prove-fix (the one member that is NOT merely checkout + git diff: it installs pytest and creates worktrees) (all described above) — live here, not in docker-build.yml, and that separation is the fix for ersatztv#535.

Why they are split out. All three are pure checkout + git diff gates on the small lane (no container:) and are PR-only (if: github.event_name == 'pull_request'). While they lived in docker-build.yml — which also triggers on push to main and on v* tags — Gitea still dispatched them as runner tasks on every such push to evaluate the skip (the small-lane behavior documented above: a job is dispatched even when its if skips it). On the v26.12.0 release tag those dispatched skip-tasks wedged in act's setup phase and were killed by a runner restart mid-setup, so they reported failure (no logs) and reddened the tag's overall commit status even though the release built, scanned, and deployed fine. The two PR-only jobs on ubuntu-latest (api-docs, format) carry the identical if: and skipped cleanly on the same tag — the job logic was never the problem; the kill lands in the dispatch window, before any step or if:-skip runs, so tweaking the if:/step logic could not fix it.

Why a separate workflow fixes it. Gitea evaluates a workflow's trigger before creating any job, so a pull_request-only workflow produces zero jobs on a tag/main push: no dispatch, no kill, no spurious red — for the whole class, permanently. The per-job if: guards are kept as belt-and-suspenders (they also encode "these steps need a PR base_ref").

What stays put and why. These three carry no CI toolchain image pin, so ci-image-pin's grep of docker-build.yml still validates the five pin-bearing jobs (test/migrations/functional-e2e/api-docs/format) that remain there. api-docs and format stay in docker-build.yml because they carry the shared-image container: + pin and run on the healthy ubuntu-latest lane (where they skipped correctly). None of the three moved jobs is a required check — branch protection requires Build & test (.NET), EF migration integrity and review-verdict/h10 (next section) — so relocating them (their status-context prefix changes from Build ErsatzTV Image / … to PR Gates / …) does not affect merges. The file declares defaults: run: shell: bash because ci-image-pin uses mapfile/set -o pipefail.

Review-verdict gate (review-verdict/h10, required — .gitea/workflows/review-verdict.yml)

A required status check named review-verdict/h10, written per-sha, is what actually stops an unreviewed commit from merging (ersatztv#622). It is not produced by a job's success/failure; it is a commit status that scripts/post-review-verdict.sh POSTs onto one specific sha.

main is PR-only AND admin-override-proof, and it takes both to make the check load-bearing (ersatztv#743, release.main-direct-push-disabled). Gitea evaluates status_check_contexts when it merges a PR — a direct git push origin HEAD:main never consults them. So until 2026-08-05 the entire gate was skippable with no forgery at all, which was cheaper than every route enumerated in #697. main now carries two fields, and citing either alone is a mistake:

• enable_push: false — a direct push is refused server-side at pre-receive (Not allowed to push to protected branch main), for every account including a site admin. The contents API is refused too — measured, HTTP 403 user cannot commit to repo. The web editor, upload, apply-patch, revert and cherry-pick paths share that same CanUserPush predicate and are therefore expected to refuse as well, but were not probed (source-attested only).
• block_admin_merge_override: true — without it (the default is false), a repo admin could POST /pulls/{n}/merge with force_merge: true and merge straight past a missing or red review-verdict/h10. Disabling push alone just moves the bypass from the push path to the merge path, since timothy is admin and is the identity every session already uses. Measured 2026-08-28 (ersatztv#747), replacing the earlier source-attested-only note. Two throwaway scratch bases, each with its own rule, head and PR — differing by construction, not by mutating one rule in place: on scratch/747a-base with the field false, an admin force_merge past an ABSENT required context MERGED (HTTP 200); on scratch/747b-base, whose rule was identical but for the field set true, the same call was refused (HTTP 405 Not all required status checks successful). The pair is the evidence — arm B's 405 has no attribution control of its own. It never required merging an unreviewed PR into main: a scratch BASE branch carries its own rule, so the experiment is disposable. Full arm table, including the ordinary-merge arm and its control: release.main-direct-push-disabled. enable_bypass_allowlist is not a substitute in the one configuration tested: enabled with an EMPTY username list (and block_admin_merge_override: false) the admin force-merge still returned HTTP 200. A non-empty list was not tested.

Operator recovery when a required context gets stuck. block_admin_merge_override: true removes the "Merge (admin)" / force_merge: true escape that used to unstick a PR whose required context was absent or wrongly red — a recurring situation here (a killed run overwriting a newer green, an advisory red counted into the combined status, a gate workflow that cannot post). That escape is gone by design: it was also the bypass. The supported recovery is to fix the status (re-run the job, or re-post the verdict with scripts/post-review-verdict.sh); the last resort is to PATCH .../branch_protections/main setting block_admin_merge_override: false, merge, and set it straight back. Do the last one deliberately and say so in the PR — it is the one action that re-opens the hole this section exists to close.

Practical consequences: every change to main goes through a PR, including a one-line docs fix; and the client-side Husky guards (H6/H11/H13) remain useful friction but were never the control — they are fail-open and --no-verify bypasses them. Tag pushes are unaffected (separate mechanism; tag_protections is empty), so the release cut in "Cutting a release" still works unchanged.

A fourth arm: guard-scope freshness (ersatztv#787). scripts/tests/test_ci_dropped_step_guard.py decides which CI jobs must carry per-step execution markers by DERIVING that scope from .gitea/required-status-contexts.json, the committed mirror of main's required status checks. It derives rather than repeating a literal because its own CI job, pr-checks.yml::script-tests, checks out with persist-credentials: false and cannot ask Gitea — which leaves the snapshot as the one hand-maintained input in the chain. So the merge hook reconciles it: it reads branch_protections, hands the payload to scripts/check-required-contexts.sh, and asks (never denies) when the live list no longer matches. The comparison is against the EFFECTIVE required set: a rule with enable_status_check: false requires nothing whatever its status_check_contexts still holds, so reading the list without the flag would certify disabled protection as current.

Two consequences worth knowing before you meet them. The immediate merge path now reads a repo-admin-scoped endpoint: before #787 branch_protections was fetched only when arming a scheduled auto-merge, so a credential without repo-admin scope kept its auto-grant on the common path and now gets a prompt there instead. That is the fail-closed direction and it is loud, but it is a real change in what the gate needs. The arm runs only for the repo the snapshot names (its repo field): the merge tool is called with whatever owner/repo is being merged, and judging another repo by this one's mirror would report a confident finding about a repo the mirror does not describe.

And what it does not reach: a docs/process-only PR exits at the hook's docs-only passthrough before this arm, so a PR editing only .gitea/required-status-contexts.json — the snapshot-narrowing direction — never triggers it. That passthrough is a human prompt rather than an auto-grant, and the arm could not have judged such a PR anyway, since it compares the live server against the snapshot in the local checkout rather than the one the PR proposes. Ask rather than deny because drift does not make that merge unsafe — Gitea enforces the live required set server-side — while a stale guard scope means a required context may have no dropped-step guard at all. The arm runs last, so it can only downgrade an otherwise-satisfied auto-grant and never masks a more serious refusal, and it runs on both merge paths: the pre-existing branch-protection read sits inside the merge_when_checks_succeed branch and never fires on an immediate merge. Rule selection is shared, not copied — both the hook and the checker load scripts/lib/branch-rule-classifier.jq.

The hole it closes. pretooluse-merge-consent.sh proves its three consent conditions at the moment the merge tool is called. Pass merge_when_checks_succeed=true and Gitea performs the merge later, against whatever head is green then — while the Done-when and review-verdict checks were proven against the head at scheduling time. Every commit pushed in between merges unreviewed.

This was demonstrated as a controlled A/B rather than inferred (ci/fake stands in for a slow CI check so Gitea waits, as it really does): review head A → post its verdict → schedule auto-merge → push an unreviewed commit B → CI greens on B. Without the required verdict context, B merged. With it, the same sequence was refused, and merged only once B itself was reviewed.

Note the motivating anecdote in ersatztv#622 — "PR #619 merged 263 insertions with no verdict" — is wrong: #619 does carry Review-verdict: MERGEABLE @ 02c82b35, posted six seconds before the merge, explicitly re-reviewing the follow-up commits. It was filed from an API read that lagged. The gap is real anyway, and structural: nothing forced that re-review inside the 45-minute window where Gitea would have merged whatever went green. This turns diligence into construction.

Why a commit status fixes it and a smarter hook cannot. A status belongs to exactly one sha, so a new commit cannot inherit it: the required context is simply absent on the new head, Gitea's merge-requirement check reads that as not-passing, and the scheduled auto-merge refuses to fire. The invariant self-invalidates — nothing has to notice the push. It also covers merge paths the hook never sees (Gitea UI, raw API, another agent's session).

Posting a verdict. After reviewing a PR's current head:

ETV_GITEA_BASICAUTH=user:pass scripts/post-review-verdict.sh <pr> MERGEABLE [note...]

That posts both the Review-verdict: … @ <sha> comment (the human-readable artifact, and the hook's condition (c)) and the review-verdict/h10 status on the same sha. BLOCKED / NOT-MERGEABLE post a failure status instead. The script re-reads the head after commenting: if a commit landed mid-flight it writes no status and exits non-zero rather than retargeting your verdict at a commit you never read.

The verdict words are declared once in scripts/lib/review-verdict-vocabulary.sh, and both sides derive from it: post-review-verdict.sh classifies through etv_verdict_class, and check-review-verdict.sh builds its POS_RE/NEG_RE from etv_verdict_alternation. Adding a word is a one-line edit to that file and it reaches both sides by construction (ersatztv#788, release.verdict-vocabulary-shared). Only the WORD SET is shared — the grammar the classifier applies around it (the column-0 anchor, the whole-word boundary, the anchored @ <sha> field) stays in check-review-verdict.sh, where every #629 false-open actually lived. Run scripts/post-review-verdict.sh with no arguments to print the live vocabulary.

Two things follow that are easy to get wrong. Do not reintroduce a parity test that compares the two scripts' sources: #774 shipped one and withdrew it after six review rounds, each finding another shell construction that escaped the extractor or reddened it on a correct tree. And a vocabulary that cannot be loaded or does not validate yields no words on either side — the reader exits 2 (which callers treat as an unreadable input and fail closed on), the writer exits 1 having posted nothing. Words are interpolated into a regex, so a .* in the positive list would classify an explicit BLOCKED as positive; validation restricts every word to [a-z][a-z-]*.

What enforces that is a data dependency, not the if around the validator — worth knowing before editing either script, because the obvious reading is wrong and the first version of #788 shipped the hole. Under set -u, an unbound-variable error inside a function aborts the function but not the script, and in an if ! validate form neither branch runs, so the exit 2 is skipped. The reader has no set -e, so unvalidated words reached the regex and an explicit BLOCKED @ head classified positive, exit 0. Validation now sets a sentinel on its last line and the derived views refuse without it. Likewise a top-level exit in a sourced library terminates the sourcing script where it stands, so both consumers probe-source the library in a subshell and require an end-of-file marker before trusting it.

The status description also records the base branch — Review-verdict: MERGEABLE @ abc1234 (base: main) — and the merge-consent hook denies when that no longer matches the PR's live base.ref (ersatztv#632). Retargeting a PR changes the effective diff without moving the head sha, so the per-sha binding alone cannot see it. This is detection on the hook path only: a commit status carries no base of its own, so a merge driven through the Gitea UI or API is unaffected. The comparator is the base branch, never its tip sha — a base that merely advances is ordinary churn, and comparing tips would invalidate every open verdict on every unrelated merge to main.

Exemptions are handled by review-verdict.yml on every pull_request_target event, which posts the status as success for Renovate-authored PRs (it uses platformAutomerge: true, so a required verdict with no exemption would stall every dependency bump) and for docs-only PRs, and as pending for everything else so the block has a visible reason. Both exemptions are void when the PR touches .claude/, .codex/, .gitea/, .husky/, scripts/ or docker/ci/ — a PR that can weaken the gate must not be able to exempt itself from the gate. That includes Renovate's docker/ci base bumps, which already need the manual publish-then-pin two-step anyway.

The Renovate exemption additionally requires every changed path to be a dependency manifest — Directory.Packages.props or .config/dotnet-tools.json, and only those (ersatztv#698). The npm manifests are deliberately excluded: renovate.json enables only nuget/github-actions/dockerfile, so npm is unmanaged here, while package.json scripts are executed by CI (npm ci, npm run build) — exempting it would put a code-execution path inside the allow-list for no benefit. An author match alone is not enough, because pull_request.user.login is the PR's immutable creator while its head is not: pushing application code onto an open Renovate branch leaves the PR still "authored by renovate" and, previously, still exempt. A Renovate PR touching anything else — a .csproj, a source file — is not blocked, it just needs a real verdict. If a dependency PR is unexpectedly asking for a verdict, this is why; the status description says so.

The two exemptions are evaluated as independent predicates, never as an elif chain: a Renovate PR touching only docs/ still gets the docs-only exemption on its own merits.

An existing review-verdict/h10 success on the head is only left alone when it is positively identifiable as a verdict from an approved reviewer — a .creator.login in the workflow's H10_REVIEWERS allow-list and a Review-verdict: description, which is what post-review-verdict.sh writes. Anything else, including any shape the workflow does not recognise, is re-derived rather than inherited. An existing failure is left alone on a weaker test — attributable (Review-verdict:, a non-null creator, and a base matching this PR's) but not necessarily allow-listed — see the state asymmetry below. (Measured: a status POSTed with a user credential carries a creator; one POSTed by an Actions job carries "creator": null.) Without this, an exemption obtained once was accepted unchanged on every later run.

The allow-list replaced a "non-null creator" test (ersatztv#742), and how wide that old test really was is the point. Non-null proved only that some user credential POSTed the status, and this repo stores credentials for accounts that are not reviewers. RENOVATE_TOKEN is a write:repository PAT of the renovate bot; unlike the registry credential it cannot be scoped down (Renovate needs repo write to push branches and open PRs), and secrets are a per-repo store rather than a per-workflow grant, so a PR-added workflow can reference it and POST a Review-verdict: success that reads back creator: renovate — non-null, and therefore inheritable. (Inferred, not observed: renovate has never actually posted a commit status in this repo — every row on all six Renovate-authored PR heads carries creator: null. The user-credential-vs-Actions-token asymmetry underneath it IS measured.) Membership makes every non-reviewer account's success re-derive exactly as an Actions-token status does. The list is a literal in the workflow, not a repo vars: entry or a secret: those are settable without a PR, i.e. without this gate, while .gitea/ is on the PROTECTED path list so the edit cannot ride a docs-only exemption either.

The allow-list governs an inherited success. It does NOT govern a failure, and the asymmetry is deliberate: an off-list failure is left alone, because inheriting a rejection can only ever withhold an exemption while re-deriving one can turn it green on an exempt PR. The worst a forged failure achieves is a stall, and post-review-verdict.sh POSTs unconditionally, so any human clears it in one command.

Beyond that, two other readers of .creator stay broad, and the split is load-bearing. read_existing_verdict carries two flags: ex_attributable (an attributable Review-verdict: row for this base, whoever wrote it) and ex_human (ex_attributable plus membership).

• The inheritance short-circuit reads ex_human. Narrowing is safe there: an unrecognised account falls through to re-derivation.
• The last-moment re-read reads ex_attributable, because it asks the opposite question — "did a reviewer post a verdict while we were classifying". Narrowing it makes the job stop abstaining and post its exemption over the row, and the post-write repair would not cover that — it is skipped whenever the high-water mark could not be established, which since ersatztv#849 is also the case in which no exemption is posted at all. It additionally requires the state/creator/description triple to have changed since the first read, because the two calls no longer compute an identical predicate and "changed" can no longer be inferred from "fired".
• The post-write raced check stays broad on creator != null. Not because narrowing it would let a rejection go green — a real reviewer is on the list by construction — but for the misconfiguration case, a second human account added to the repo and forgotten from the literal. Its reach is narrower than it looks: it covers such a verdict landing inside the write window and nothing else, since a verdict already on the head sits below the high-water mark and is invisible to it. Within that window the errors are asymmetric — a repair to pending is recoverable, a wrongly-standing success is not — so it stays broad. The cost: any verdict-shaped row landing in that window trips the sticky repair sentinel and costs that head its exemption until a human clears it.

Pinned by test_the_MID_RUN_abstain_still_fires_for_a_NON_allowlisted_creator and test_the_RACED_verdict_check_still_counts_a_NON_allowlisted_creator.

If a reviewer's verdicts stop being honoured, this is why. Whenever the job declines to inherit an existing status it logs the creator, the allow-list and the description together, and says to add the account to H10_REVIEWERS in .gitea/workflows/review-verdict.yml. (A separate ::warning:: annotation carrying the same three values was tried and withdrawn: its only delta was a severity whose rendering could not be probed, and it needed a guard of its own to stop contradicting the line above it.) post-review-verdict.sh posts with whatever account owns ETV_GITEA_TOKEN/ETV_GITEA_BASICAUTH, and since ersatztv#845 it checks that it is an allow-listed one — at the terminal that made the mistake, not one PR event later. It reads the status back after posting, identifies its own write by state and description, and refuses before writing the comment unless .creator.login is a member; a creator: null (Actions-token) status gets its own message, since there is no account to name. The allow-list is DERIVED from the H10_REVIEWERS literal in review-verdict.yml by scripts/lib/h10-reviewers.sh, not restated beside it, so there is one declaration rather than two plus a parity test.

The membership requirement is success-only, mirroring the gate's own asymmetry. An existing failure is inherited on ATTRIBUTABILITY alone, whichever account recorded it, so requiring membership for a BLOCKED verdict would refuse one the gate honours perfectly well — and would leave an off-list reviewer no supported way to record a rejection, since the comment would be withheld too. A negative verdict from any attributable account is written and commented normally.

What that changes is the diagnostic, not the safety direction: a non-allow-listed POSITIVE verdict was always a stall, never a fail-open. Before, a changed writer credential reported success and each subsequent PR event re-derived the status — to pending on a PR that needs a verdict, or to an exemption success on a docs-only or Renovate-manifest one, which is the quieter and worse half — so the symptom was a PR that kept losing its verdict rather than an immediate refusal. Now it is an immediate refusal naming the account and the allow-list.

The residual, stated precisely, because "the ask half-state" describes only half of it. The check runs after the POST, so a refused verdict leaves a review-verdict/h10 standing on the head with no comment beside it. On the hook path that is the safe half-state release.verdict-writes-status-before-comment designates — nothing for condition (c) to classify, so it asks rather than granting. On the server path it is weaker: branch protection binds the context NAME and not its issuer, so a success posted by any account satisfies the required check until the gate re-derives it on the next PR event. A refusal from this tool is not a reason to trust the green it leaves behind. That is not a regression — it was equally true before #845, when the tool reported success and said nothing — and it is deliberately not repaired here, because a second corrective write is the sticky-sentinel mechanism ersatztv#849 is separately designing.

One false ACCEPT, named because the direction matters. The writer reads the workflow in the local checkout while the gate runs the base-resolved one, so on a branch that ADDS a reviewer the writer accepts an account the live gate will not yet inherit from — the #845 stall, reached through the check meant to catch it, on the one branch where someone is editing the allow-list. Accepted: closing it means a live remote read on the merge-consent write path, whose own read failure would have to resolve either to refusing every verdict or to passing. The window is one PR long and the residual is a stall, never an unreviewed merge.

This remains a provenance check, not an authentication one — an allow-listed collaborator's own write-scoped token can still POST a verdict they did not form, branch protection binds the context name rather than its issuer, and no repo-side change closes that (ersatztv#697). That provenance asymmetry is why the credential scoping in ci.actions-credential-scoping mattered: a forgery through an allow-listed user credential inherits, while one through a job's GITEA_TOKEN carries creator: null and is re-derived, so it must win a race. Note also that re-derivation is not a race the attacker can lose: it fires only on the trigger's types, and posting a status is not one of them, so a POST timed after the last PR event stands until the next one.

Deciding either exemption requires the PR's complete changed-file list, which the workflow does not compute itself: it calls scripts/pr-changed-files.sh, the single shared implementation also used by the advisory hook .claude/hooks/pretooluse-merge-consent.sh (ersatztv#649). The workflow reads that script's exit status — a non-zero exit means "could not tell" and withholds the exemption; its stdout is meaningless on any failure path and is never consumed.

Never write a classification guard as producer | grep -q… here. Under set -o pipefail, grep -q exits at its first match, the producer takes SIGPIPE (141), and a MATCH is reported as a failed pipeline — inverting the guard for any PR whose path list exceeds the pipe buffer. That let a large PR be classified docs-only, and let one editing .gitea/ skip the protected-path check entirely. A here-string is also wrong (bash spills a large one to temp storage, which fails the same way when temp is full). Count instead — grep -c drains stdin over an ordinary pipe — evaluate the counts once at top level rather than inline in an if, and fail closed on a non-numeric result. Full detail: ci.grep-q-pipefail-inversion.

That script takes the expected base branch as a required 5th argument and refuses to enumerate when the PR's live base does not match it, checked both before and after paging (ersatztv#698). /pulls/{n}/files diffs against the PR's live base, so retargeting changes the answer without moving the head sha — a PR opened into main and retargeted mid-run was granted a docs-only exemption while its diff against main carried a C# file. The workflow passes the base from the pull_request_target payload, which a retarget cannot rewrite, and edited is in types: so a retarget reclassifies. edited gives detection, not atomicity: runs are not serialized, so a stale run could still post success after the reclassifying run posted pending.

That residual is now fenced — NARROWED, not resolved (ersatztv#706; correction ersatztv#849). The pre-write fence does not re-count after the POST, so a retarget landing between its final pre-write count and the write used to yield a permanent forged green: the successor run consumes the edited event and exits on the existing status, and the stale run then posts last with nothing left to correct it. Since ersatztv#849 a SEPARATE post-POST re-count (below) makes that green transient rather than permanent. Runs are still not serialized — instead a run that was overtaken declines to write its classification. The job counts change_target_branch events on the PR's issue timeline at start and again immediately before its POST, and posts nothing if the count moved. The count is the key precisely because the branch name is ABA-vulnerable: main → scratch → main reads main at both ends, which is how the forged exemption was obtained in the first place. Abstaining never strands a PR, because every retarget fires edited — the event that makes one run abstain has already queued its successor.

If the count can't be established (unreadable timeline, an empty FIRST page, or paging that reached the 20-page cap on a NON-empty one — since #870 an empty page before the cap no longer ends the walk), only the exemption success is withheld; pending still posts, since it blocks the merge immediately and withholding it would strand ordinary PRs whenever the timeline is unreadable. That is the right trade but not a free one — a generic pending still masks a rejection landing in its own write window. What made that durable is gone: since ersatztv#849 the post-write check runs after every write, so such a write is repaired to the sticky sentinel instead of being re-derived into an exemption by a later run. If an exempt PR is unexpectedly missing its status after a retarget, this is why — the job log names the counts.

The count is also re-taken AFTER the POST, on the exemption path only (ersatztv#849, ci.verdict-unverified-write-sentinel). The pre-write fence covers writing while overtaken; it never covered being overtaken after writing, which was the worse of the two — a retarget landing after the final pre-write count left a stale success with the edited event already consumed by a successor that short-circuited, so nothing remained to reclassify. It makes that green transient rather than permanent, not absent: the success is live between its POST and the repair, so branch protection or a scheduled auto-merge can still observe it. Closing that window needs a compare-and-set the API does not offer. The retarget axis only: a push after the POST moves the head, so the status no longer gates that PR, while a retarget changes the effective diff with the sha unchanged.

Worth knowing before reaching for the obvious alternative: a concurrency group does not work here, measured rather than assumed. Gitea 1.25.4 auto-cancels superseded push runs on a branch, but not pull_request_target runs — two runs for one PR genuinely overlap, and adding concurrency: {…, cancel-in-progress: false} changed nothing (probe runs still overlapped by 36s). cancel-in-progress: true is deliberately untried, because a cancelled run leaves an exempt PR statusless with nothing left to re-trigger it. Full measurements and the two surviving residuals: ci.verdict-write-retarget-fence.

Since ersatztv#803 that fence counts two event types on the one timeline walk: change_target_branch for the base alias (main -> S -> main) and pull_push for the HEAD alias (a force-push H1 -> H2 -> H1 spanning pr-changed-files.sh's paging, which leaves every sha comparison equal). Either count moving withholds the write. The run log line is Mutation fence: N retarget event(s) and M push event(s) … (trusted=…).

The push-supersession half of that claim stays 1.25.4-dated on purpose (ersatztv#747, 2026-08-28). It is not unobservable, but it is no longer reproducible ON DEMAND. No workflow triggers on a push to a non-main branch — docker-build.yml filters its push trigger to main plus v* tags, ci-image.yml to main and docker/ci/** with deliberately no tags: key (ci.toolchain-image-publish-is-a-dispatch), and the other four have no push trigger at all — and main itself refuses direct pushes since release.main-direct-push-disabled. A PR merge IS a push to main, so two merges landing close together remain a route; a v* tag push triggers docker-build.yml but is not one, because supersession is per-ref and a release tag is pushed once. What is gone is the cheap disposable probe — the scratch-branch route the other measurements used. Re-running it would mean arranging two real merges, or adding a throwaway trigger; both cost more than the claim is worth, because nothing branches on it. The pull_request_target half the fence actually relies on was not re-measured either and is 1.25.4-dated too.

The two facts this paragraph rests on — that no workflow triggers on a push to a non-main branch, and that main refuses direct pushes — were re-checked on 2026-09-02 (ersatztv#869) and both still hold. Note what that does and does not cover: it re-checks the REASON, not the claims. The push-supersession and pull_request_target measurements above remain 1.25.4-dated and were not re-run by #869 either. Re-checking the reason matters on its own, because a reason decays exactly like the claim it excuses. One limit is worth stating so this is not over-read: the enumeration covers push: triggers only. Four of the six workflows carry workflow_dispatch:, so a disposable run can still be raised on demand — what is gone is the cheap scratch-BRANCH push probe, not every route to a throwaway run.

Separately, after posting any status the job re-reads the per-POST status history and, if a human Review-verdict: row appeared during the write window, overwrites its own status with pending and logs an error. It ran only for a success write until ersatztv#849, on the claim that a pending cannot turn a rejection green — false, since a generic pending masks a rejection just as well and, carrying no marker, is re-derived into an exemption by the next run with the human's row now below THAT run's high-water mark. The repair is pending, never a copy of the human's verdict, which would attribute a human decision to the job.

Which sentinel the repair writes is part of the answer. There are two, and they are not interchangeable (ci.verdict-unverified-write-sentinel):

• Human verdict raced this exemption write — re-post the verdict asserts that a verdict existed and a write buried it. Only the arm that actually counted such a row may claim it, and only a human re-posting clears it.
• Status write could not be verified — re-post the verdict states only what was established — that the write could not be checked. Every "could not check" arm writes this one: an unreadable or over-cap history, an impossible empty history, an unusable count, no high-water mark at all, a post-POST retarget, and an unreadable combined-status read. It is equally sticky, and additionally reconcilable: a later run pages /statuses/{sha} in full and either finds a verdict underneath it — upgrading to the repair sentinel — or finds none and clears it, so a transient API failure does not cost a head its exemption permanently.

No high-water mark means the write becomes the sentinel — every re-derivable state, not only the exemption — withheld before the POST rather than posted and repaired: the defect is known in advance, and publishing a green to take it back opens a window branch protection, and an already-scheduled auto-merge, can see. A generic pending is included because it is exactly what a later run re-derives; $REPAIR_DESC is not, being the stronger fact.

Every path that cannot establish what the head carries REPLACES the unknown state rather than merely declining to write: the combined read (retried once first), all four page-2 completeness refusals, a row or consumed field whose type the schema does not allow, the path-predicate failure, the fence branch that cannot trust its retarget count while holding a derived success, and the two OBSERVED-mutation arms when the head carries a row the run did not inherit. Declining protects a real verdict and leaves a forged one standing, which is what an off-list success is; the job went red on a status branch protection does not read, and the fence branch was reached only after the classification had DECLINED to inherit the very row it then left current. Nothing is destroyed — /statuses/{sha} keeps one row per POST, so the next run's reconciliation finds a masked verdict and tells the reviewer to re-post. Writing the sentinel and failing the job are separate decisions: the read refusals were already non-zero exits and stay red, the fence branch exited 0 and still does.

Reconciliation needs a witness. It may clear the sentinel only over a complete history that CONTAINS the sentinel's own row, matched by the id the combined read reported — degrading to a DESCRIPTION match, which identifies a row with the same text rather than that row, only where the server omits id. ex_unverified means the combined endpoint just returned that row and /statuses/{sha} keeps one row per POST, so a complete-but-empty history contradicts a write that demonstrably happened — and page_statuses accepts an empty page 1 as complete, which is what made the shape reachable. The cost lands where the replacement actually cost something: on an APPROVED PR, reconciliation finds the masked verdict and upgrades to the repair sentinel, so the recovery is "you are asked to re-post", not "it clears itself".

Every /statuses/{sha} read is PAGED (ersatztv#763). The history is read twice on an ordinary run — before the write for the high-water mark, after it for the race check — and a THIRD time on a head carrying the unverified sentinel, for the reconciliation (ersatztv#849). limit clamps to MAX_RESPONSE_ITEMS (measured 50), so a single read of a busy head returned a partial list.

Be precise about what that cost — ersatztv#763's framing of it is too strong. Under the server default (created_unix DESC) page 1 holds the newest rows and ids are monotonic with created_at, so page 1 already carried both the true maximum id and every row newer than the mark — the only rows the post-write check selects on. A single-page read therefore missed a raced verdict only if more than 50 rows were created inside the write window, not merely on "a head with more than 50 rows". What actually removed PR #761's stall is the deletion of the page-2 probe below, not the paging.

The walk earns its place for a different reason: it removes the gate's one fail-toward-SUCCESS path from depending on an undocumented ordering the server honours only coarsely (page 1 came back 114,112,113,111,110 — newest-first, but not strictly, and nothing in the API contract promises even that). Both reads walk to a validated empty page, never terminating on a short one, retrying each page once. The termination rule is page-size independent; the capacity is not — 20 requests of 50 validate at most 950 rows, since the twentieth must be the empty terminator. The terminator is measured per endpoint and they differ: /statuses/{sha} returns [], /issues/{n}/timeline a bare null, /commits/{sha}/status an object with statuses: null.

The two walks terminate by OPPOSITE rules, and that asymmetry is deliberate (ersatztv#870, settled by ersatztv#893 on 2026-09-02). count_pr_mutations reads the timeline to its cap and trusts the counts only when the LAST page came back empty; page_statuses still returns on its FIRST empty page. They differ because the ENDPOINTS differ, established from the v1.27.1 source: getCommitStatuses serializes every row the paged query returns — an unconditional append loop, the only filter being a SQL WHERE the database evaluates in the same query as the LIMIT/OFFSET — so a serialized page is exactly as long as its database page, and an empty page really is the end. ListIssueCommentsAndTimeline instead drops CommentTypeCode rows AFTER paging, which is what makes a fully filtered page byte-identical to the end of the list. The same source explains the header: /statuses/{sha} sets X-Total-Count from a SQL COUNT, so it is a true total (page 1 of 50 on a head reporting 63, measured 2026-09-02), where the timeline reports its post-filter page length. Do not "tidy" the two walks into agreement.

The page-2 probe is gone. ersatztv#751 treated "there are rows I did not read" as "assume raced". That fired on Renovate PR #761: a head that grew past one page over ordinary CI re-runs had its exemption repaired away, with an ::error:: asserting a human verdict was overwritten when the head carried none, and the sticky sentinel then refused re-exemption on every later run.

The two directions are not symmetric, and the asymmetry is deliberate:

• Post-write, uncertainty fails closed. An unreadable history, an over-cap history, or a count that does not come back as a number all repair to pending. Previously an unreadable history warned and left the exemption green while the page-2 probe repaired on the same uncertainty — one check disagreeing with itself.
• Pre-write, a partial list still yields a mark. The mark gates the post-write check entirely, so refusing one skips the check and is itself a fail-open. This rests on the DESC default above: the newest row, carrying the maximum id, is on page 1, so a walk that fails later still saw it. A validated empty history is a different case and is not abandoned: it yields a mark of 0, which is correct, since every later row is newer — that is the normal first run. What abandons the mark is a read that both failed and returned nothing, the pre-existing gap tracked as ersatztv#849 and unchanged here. A non-empty history carrying no numeric id is reported as unusable rather than collapsed to 0.

Two id comparisons are numeric-only, closing the string half of a fail-open (a type guard, not a value bound — a corrupt but genuinely numeric id would still inflate the mark, which is not attacker-controllable since ids are server-assigned): jq orders strings above every number, so one "id": "99999" would inflate the high-water mark until nothing looked newer, and .id > $since would read any string id as newer than any mark — making a pre-existing base-mismatched verdict look raced on every run, a permanent stall. .creator is likewise type-tested before it is indexed, because .creator.login on a non-object exits jq 5 and, under set -e, took the step down after the green was posted and before the repair.

Rejected alternatives, recorded so they are not re-adopted:

• A currency witness (require a row above the mark, proving the read reflects the POST just made). Counting any row above the mark does not witness this job's write, so a stale-but-valid snapshot carrying an unrelated newer row still passes; and a schema-valid stale read is not retried, so one such response turns a transient anomaly into a permanent sentinel. Gitea here is a single instance with no read replicas, so the hazard has no mechanism behind it.
• sort=highestindex (index ASC, measured), which would close the mid-walk-insert gap below. ASC puts the oldest rows on page 1, which inverts the partial-mark fallback: the incomplete walk's maximum becomes the max of the oldest rows, leaving every pre-existing row above the mark and read as raced. That is the #761 failure, re-introduced to close a smaller one. A test asserts the request carries no sort parameter.

Accepted residual: a row inserted mid-walk can be missed. These are independent offset-paginated GETs with no snapshot token, so under DESC a new row lands at position 0 — on a page already read — while everything else shifts down. It is bounded: a row arriving after this job's POST is not one the job overwrote, and being newest it wins on the combined endpoint branch protection reads.

An empty post-write history is rejected. The walk terminates on an empty page — correct before the write, impossible after it, since this job has just POSTed and the endpoint returns one row per POST. A well-formed "no statuses exist" is not retried (the body is valid), so accepting it would conclude raced=0 from a list that cannot be real, silently. This is not the withdrawn currency witness: that asked whether ANY row sat above the mark, which an unrelated newer row satisfied; this asks only whether the list is empty, which no unrelated row can produce.

The ::error:: names its own cause, and there are three: a verdict actually found; a read that could not be completed; and a read that completed but returned an impossible answer. The third is not a variety of the second — an operator holding a sticky sentinel needs to know whether to go looking for an API failure that never happened. The sentinel description stays generic, because the classification recognises it as a fixed point.

Three properties of this workflow are security-relevant and are structurally asserted by tests in scripts/tests/test_pr_changed_files.py — those tests pin the workflow's shape, which is not the same as establishing that the gate cannot be forged (see the residual below, and ersatztv#697/#698):

• The trigger is pull_request_target, scoped to branches: [main] — never plain pull_request (ersatztv#672). Gitea resolves a pull_request workflow definition from the PR's own head, so under that trigger a PR editing review-verdict.yml ran its own rewritten copy and could post review-verdict/h10=success for itself. The base-ref checkout below binds the scripts this job runs; only the trigger binds the definition. The branches filter is half the fix, not a refinement of it: base resolution means the base branch supplies the gate, so an unfiltered trigger merely moves the rewrite to an attacker-pushed base — and a status forged there is inherited by any later PR carrying the same head sha (ersatztv#663). pull_request_target is safe here only because this job never checks out or executes head-supplied code. Verified on this instance with four scratch PRs rather than inferred from GitHub; full rationale in docs/decisions/records/ci/gate-trigger-base-resolved.md. This closes the rewrite route through this workflow, not the class: docker-build.yml is also head-resolved and must stay on pull_request because it builds the PR's code, so it got the read-only status identity instead — its ETV_STATUS_AUTH is now a PAT scoped write:package + read:repository, which the status endpoint refuses (ci.actions-credential-scoping, ersatztv#697). The inventory was never that one workflow, though: Gitea injects a write-capable GITEA_TOKEN into every job and branch protection binds the context, not its issuer. Gitea >=1.26 with the Actions default set to Restricted (server-management#714) binds the injected token, but does not close the class either — not against a personal token, and not against RENOVATE_TOKEN (ersatztv#742). And none of it was necessary: direct pushes to main were server-side permitted, so the gate could be skipped without any forgery (ersatztv#743). That is now CLOSED — main carries enable_push: false and block_admin_merge_override: true, so it is reachable only through the PR merge path, the one path on which Gitea evaluates status_check_contexts, and an admin cannot force_merge past them (release.main-direct-push-disabled — neither field is citable alone). Note the fix is disabling push, not whitelisting it: a push whitelist naming timothy was measured to still admit the push, and timothy is the identity every session, PAT and injected GITEA_TOKEN already acts as, so the whitelist form would have closed nothing. The block binds a site admin at pre-receive but not a credential that can first PATCH branch protection off — an accepted residual, recorded in that decision. The exemption path has separate defects of its own (ersatztv#698). One operational consequence of the trigger change: a PR whose base is not main now gets no review-verdict/h10 at all. That is fail-closed. edited is now among the trigger's types (ersatztv#698), so a PR retargeted onto main reclassifies instead of staying statusless until its next push — but note that only gives detection: runs are not serialized, so a stale run can still post success after the reclassifying run posts pending (ersatztv#706).
• The checkout takes the PR's BASE ref, ref: ${{ github.event.pull_request.base.sha }} with persist-credentials: false — never the head. This job judges the PR, so the PR must not supply the code that judges it; a head checkout would let a PR edit the enumeration to return an empty list and exempt itself.
• scripts/jq-preflight.sh runs in floor-only mode, never --expect. This job writes a branch-protection-required status, so an exact version pin would turn any jq upgrade on the runner into a repo-wide merge deadlock.

A PR whose base predates ersatztv#658 has no such script on its base ref; that case posts pending with the reason rather than dying with no status at all.

⚠️ Changing review-verdict.yml itself: it is not exercised by its own PR. Base resolution cuts both ways — the PR editing this workflow runs the version already on main, so an edit goes live only on merge, repo-wide, having never run. A broken edit merges green and then breaks the gate for every subsequent PR, and the PR that would repair it is gated by the same broken workflow. Do not trust the editing PR's own checks. Verify the way ersatztv#672 did:

1. Push a scratch base branch carrying the candidate workflow.
2. Open a throwaway PR from a scratch head into that base, so the candidate is the definition that runs. Have it post a probe-named context (e.g. review-verdict/h10-PROBE), never the real review-verdict/h10 — a probe must not be able to forge the gate it is testing.
3. Read the resulting commit statuses to see which definition actually ran, then delete both branches.

The same shape is what makes a branches:/types: change verifiable at all, since neither can be observed from the editing PR. Note step 2 requires the scratch base's own branches: filter to name that base — the definition comes from the base, so a base the filter does not admit produces no run at all.

⚠️ Never write an expression delimiter inside a run: body here — a comment is NOT inert (ersatztv#751, ci.workflow-run-body-no-expressions). A run: body is not shell when the runner reads it. The runner scans the whole scalar for the expression opener and, on finding one, rewrites the entire body into a single format(...) call so the result can be spliced back in. That rewrite is all-or-nothing: a payload that does not evaluate fails the interpolation of the whole scalar, and the runner then drops the step and concludes the job success.

That is not hypothetical. From 8f6d4f443 (2026-08-03) to 2026-08-06 the classify step never ran. The #706 note above, explaining why a concurrency group does not work here, quoted a concurrency: snippet containing a PR-number expression as an illustration, in a shell comment. pr number is not a valid expression. So review-verdict/h10 was posted by nothing but a human hand for three days, both exemption classes silently stopped working, and every run reported success. The prose documenting a fix disabled the fix.

The silent green is the real defect. An absent required status reads as "not reviewed yet", which is indistinguishable from the correct pending state — so an ordinary PR looked ordinary while the gate was dead, and the cost landed only where no human was in the loop. PR #739 (docs-only) merged 2026-08-05 with zero commit statuses on its head, and got in only because admin force-merge was still enabled; ersatztv#743 removed that escape the next day, so a docs-only or Renovate-manifest PR arriving after that would simply have been stuck with no bypass. The two Renovate PRs in the window escaped by timing, merging minutes before the bad commit.

Three things now hold the line, and they are deliberately different in kind:

• The prose names expressions instead of quoting them — write "a github.event.pull_request.number expression", not the delimiters. Pass values in through the step's env: block, which is interpolated per value, so a bad payload there cannot take the body with it.
• A start-marker guard turns a dropped step RED. The classifier writes a marker as its first act and an if: always() step fails the job when it is missing. It asserts execution started, never that it completed — the classifier has several legitimate exit 0 abstention paths. The guard's own body must stay expression-free, or the mechanism it guards against can delete the guard too, and that absence would be silent as well.
• Two static guards, in scripts/tests/test_pr_changed_files.py: no delimiter in any run: body of this file (absolute — a dropped step here is a dead merge gate, and its bodies are ~700 lines of prose), and repo-wide, every expression payload's head token must name a context or function the runner can resolve (permissive, because the other workflows interpolate into run: legitimately — 5 occurrences today, in ci-image.yml, docker-build.yml's api-docs/format and pr-checks.yml's two git-diff gates; #756 removed build's two and banned that job as well, so the ban now covers test, migrations and build). Be precise about the second one's reach: it catches the historical defect (pr number) and a nonexistent context, but not a syntactically invalid payload whose tokens are all known (${{ github.ref == }} passes), nor a renamed output (steps.metadata.outputs.shortsha passes — every token after the first is preceded by . and is skipped), nor an unclosed opener. Catching those needs an expression parser — it does not catch "a payload that cannot evaluate, wherever it sits".

Worth knowing why nothing caught this for three days: every other workflow-shape test in that file reads _code_lines(), which strips comments. That is correct for what it was for, but it encodes the assumption this bug falsifies. The strict test reads the raw scalar, and must never adopt _code_lines.

⚠️ A page past the end of /issues/{n}/timeline is JSON null, not [] — and this instance is not consistent between endpoints (/issues/{n}/comments returns [] when empty). The retarget fence's timeline walk (count_retargets, renamed count_pr_mutations by #803) gated on type == "array", so it read the real terminator as unreadable: the walk never reached a validated empty page, rt_ok was never yes for any PR, and the fence therefore withheld every exemption success. Renovate and docs-only PRs got no status at all — the same user-visible outcome as the dropped step above, by a completely unrelated route. So fixing the interpolation alone would not have restored the exemptions.

Two things kept it invisible, and both are worth generalising:

• It shipped in the same commit (8f6d4f443) that stopped the step executing, so the fence had never once run in production. A guard's first real execution is not the same event as its merge.
• The test double asserted the wrong shape while claiming measured fidelity. Its comment read "Real shapes, measured on this instance and deliberately mirrored" and it printed [] for a page past the end. Every fence test was green against a response the server never produces, so the array-only gate was never exercised by the suite either. With the double corrected and the old gate restored, most of the fence suite fails — 18 tests when first measured at c710db4a1, 21 once three more fence-dependent tests existed. The invariant is the point, not the count: they had all been passing for the wrong reason. (Given as a range on purpose: a bare count goes stale within a couple of commits, inside a section about stale claims.) When a double claims fidelity, that claim is a test assertion and needs re-measuring like any other.

The type is now read as a value (case over jq -r 'type') rather than through jq -e, whose exit-status semantics already bit this workflow once at jq 1.6, and both null and [] are read as the same EMPTY shape. The regression test is parameterised over both because both are live on this server. An empty page — null OR [], which take the SAME rule since ersatztv#803 — is no longer accepted as exhaustion before the page cap (ersatztv#870, 2026-08-30). Gitea pages this endpoint at the database level and filters afterwards, so a page whose 50 rows are all inline-code comments serializes as exactly the value the walk used to trust as the end of the list, while later pages still hold events — 50 comments, which a PR author can create on their own PR, bought silence on both axes. The walk now SKIPS an empty page before the cap, reads every page up to its 20-page cap, and trusts the counts only when the LAST page it read came back empty — the same rule the status walk above states for the CAP, though not for termination: that walk still returns on its first empty page, and whether it needs the same change is tracked at ersatztv#893 rather than assumed (measured 2026-08-30, /statuses/{sha} returns a TRUE X-Total-Count, which this endpoint does not). That moves the inference to the cap rather than removing it, and the residual is real: pages 1-19 cover offsets 0..949, so a timeline of more than 1000 rows whose offsets 950..999 are all filtered still returns an empty page 20, and the walk publishes a too-low count as trusted. Both re-reads share the blind spot, so this is the same defeat at about 10x the price — the 50-row filtered block is the same, but the timeline it must sit in grows from ~100 rows to over 1000, and on their own PR the padding is the attacker's to supply — not a closed hole. It is NOT the status walk's over-cap residual: /statuses/{sha} does not filter after paging, so only here can a page-20 response be empty while later pages hold rows. An empty FIRST page still ends the walk untrusted: every real PR's first page carries events (spot-checked non-empty across #752/#753/#749/#739/#717; the counts are deliberately not recorded here because timelines grow and such figures go stale within days), so an empty first page is ANOMALOUS rather than EXHAUSTED, and the walk should not certify "no retarget happened" from a response it cannot explain. X-Total-Count cannot shortcut this: on this endpoint it is the post-filter length of the PAGE, not a total (?limit=1 returns 1 on a 14-row timeline), unlike /activities/feeds, which does return one.

The same nil-slice shape bites /commits/{sha}/status — a third instance. A head with no statuses yet returns {"state":"pending","total_count":0,"statuses":null} (measured on PR #739's head). read_existing_verdict gated on .statuses | type == "array", so it hit its exit 1 and posted nothing at all — fail-closed, same user-visible outcome. null is now accepted there only when total_count is 0, so a body that merely lost its array is still refused and an existing verdict is still protected from a transient error. scripts/pr-changed-files.sh was swept and is unaffected (pulls/{n}/files returns []). The generalisable rule: a nil Go slice serialises to null, so every list-shaped field on this API is suspect and only a per-endpoint measurement settles it.

Establishing that "no verdict exists" needs a second page, and both arithmetic guards for it are no-ops here. read_existing_verdict concluding absence is what licenses posting an exemption over a verdict the job cannot see, so that conclusion has to be earned. Two obvious checks were tried and both proved empty:

• .statuses | length vs .total_count — total_count is the count for the page returned, not for the commit. Measured at 1.27.1 on 3aed43c6 (6 contexts): ?limit=1 returns len=1, total_count=1, ?limit=3 returns len=3, total_count=3. Equal by construction, so the check reads as a completeness proof while proving nothing.
• "refuse when the page comes back full at the requested limit=100" — this instance caps limit at the server-wide MAX_RESPONSE_ITEMS, measured at 50 (/issues?limit=100 returns 50). A response can therefore never carry 100 rows, and the comparison was dead code. The repo already documented that cap in scripts/pr-changed-files.sh, two test files and ci.script-tests-job; the guard was written against 100 anyway. Hardcoding 50 instead would re-break the day the setting changes.

So the job asks the server, and only when it matters: if the review-verdict/h10 row is on page 1 there is nothing further to learn (this endpoint returns the latest status per context, and a context cannot recur on a later page). When the row is absent it reads page 2 — any rows there mean the list runs longer than one page and a verdict could be beyond it, so it refuses instead of concluding absence. Cap-independent by construction. Paging is real here: measured ?limit=3&page=2 returning three further rows, and page=9 returning the same statuses: null terminator.

The total_count zero-check also requires the JSON type to be a number: jq -r renders 0 and "0" identically, so a text compare would accept a schema-corrupted "total_count": "0" as "no statuses".

The repo-wide expression guard scans PARSED scalars, not raw file text. A delimiter in an ordinary top-level YAML comment is inert — the runner never evaluates it — so redding on it is a false positive, and this file has now produced that false red twice. PyYAML drops those comments. A run: body is itself a scalar and keeps its shell comments, which is the point: inside a run: scalar a comment is not inert. Verified both directions by mutation — an inert top-level comment passes; the same payload in a run-body comment still reds.

CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md are now PROTECTED paths. DOCS_ONLY matched them, so the documents that define the completion protocol, the merge-consent convention and the H10 rule were themselves docs-only-exemptible while .claude/ was protected — the same self-exemption the gate rules out, one directory over. Driving the real classify body with a lone CLAUDE.md change produced review-verdict/h10=success. It is fixed here rather than deferred because restoring the exemptions is what makes it reachable: no exemption success was writable at all while the classify step was dropped. README.md is deliberately not listed — ordinary prose, no enforcement. For the same reason, #706's known residual returns with the working fence: while rt_ok was never yes, route 1 was closed by accident.

That gap is now closed — docker-build.yml's test and migrations jobs are also required contexts, and there a dropped step is fail-OPEN: the required check goes green having done no work, which is strictly worse than an absent status (compare #684). ersatztv#756 gave those two jobs per-step execution markers and extended the delimiter ban to them; see "Dropped-step guard on the required jobs" above.

It lives in its own workflow file on purpose: pr-checks.yml sets cancel-in-progress: true, and a cancelled run there would leave an exempt PR with no status and no further push to re-trigger it. Its own job context (Review verdict / Set review-verdict status) is not the required check — a workflow must not satisfy the gate merely by running successfully.

Full rationale: docs/decisions/records/release/verdict-status-check.md and docs/decisions/records/ci/shared-pr-file-enumeration.md.

CI toolchain image (docker/ci/Dockerfile, .gitea/workflows/ci-image.yml)

The jobs that need a toolchain — test, migrations, functional-e2e, api-docs, format — run inside a shared image via container: instead of installing their toolchain per run (ersatztv#390). They therefore carry no setup-dotnet, no setup-node, no apt-get, and no dotnet tool install.

What it ships: .NET 10 SDK, Node 22, prod-identical ffmpeg/ffprobe, git/python3/jq/zstd, the dotnet-ef + dotnet-reportgenerator-globaltool global tools (which the migrations and test jobs used to install on every run — bump those versions in the Dockerfile, not the workflow), and headless Chromium for the UI-E2E flows (below). Project dependencies (NuGet/npm) are deliberately not baked in — they change per commit and stay on actions/cache (~/.nuget/packages, ~/.npm).

Headless Chromium for UI-E2E (ersatztv#445). PLAYWRIGHT_BROWSERS_PATH=/ms-playwright holds chromium-headless-shell, installed with --with-deps at image build time so the functional-e2e job installs no browser per run. Measured on this exact base: the headless shell is 267M where full chromium is 656M, and chromium.launch() resolves to the shell anyway because web/playwright.config.ts never asks for headed — the accepted tradeoff being that a headed run inside this image would fail. Also verified on the real base rather than assumed: Chromium launches as root inside a container with no --no-sandbox/chromiumSandbox:false opt-out, so the config carries no sandbox workaround. The Dockerfile's build-time smoke test actually launches the browser, so a missing system library fails the image build rather than a CI run.

⚠️ ARG PLAYWRIGHT_VERSION must equal web/package.json's @playwright/test pin, which is deliberately EXACT (no caret): Playwright ties a browser revision to the package version, so a mismatch leaves no usable browser. Renovate bumps the npm pin but cannot know about this ARG — when it does, bump the ARG, publish the new :<sha> (step 1 below), then update all five container pins. scripts/e2e-ui.sh guards the drift by launching a browser up front and failing with exactly that instruction (it probes by launch, not by path, because chromium.executablePath() reports the full-chromium path that a headless-shell-only image deliberately lacks).

How it's layered: FROM ersatztv-ffmpeg:8.1.2 + COPY --from=mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/sdk:10.0-noble-amd64 /usr/share/dotnet — the same pattern docker/Dockerfile uses for the prod image. Our ffmpeg base is ghcr.io/linuxserver/baseimage-ubuntu:noble, the same Ubuntu release as the SDK image, so the copied SDK matches the base's glibc/ICU. Keep the ffmpeg tag on that FROM equal to the one docker/Dockerfile pins, so CI's ffmpeg stays prod-identical — that fidelity is what the ersatztv#299 seeded-media/scanner E2E follow-ups will need.

Bumping the toolchain is a deliberate two-step. The jobs pin an immutable :<sha>, never :latest, so a bad toolchain push cannot break every job at once. Both steps land in the same PR — a PR that changes docker/ci/** without moving the pin turns ci-image-pin red, and the merge-consent hook reads the combined status, so it will not auto-grant:

1. Publish. Push the branch with the docker/ci/Dockerfile change as HEAD, then dispatch ci-image.yml on that branch; it publishes ersatztv-ci:<sha>. (:latest moves only from main — a human pointer; jobs must never consume it.) Since ersatztv#744 a branch push does not publish; see "Publishing from a branch is a dispatch, not a push" below.
2. Pin. Update the pin in docker-build.yml — all five jobs together — on top. That PR's own CI is what proves the new image works. The pin is repeated per job because jobs.<id>.container.image cannot read the workflow env context.

The tag is exactly 7 hex chars — get the length right, not just the commit (ersatztv#594). ci-image.yml tags with git rev-parse --short HEAD under fetch-depth: 1, and that shallow clone holds few enough objects that git always abbreviates to 7. A full local clone abbreviates to 8, so the natural command prints one character too many:

git rev-parse --short HEAD     # 8 chars in a full clone — WRONG, no such registry tag
git rev-parse --short=7 HEAD   # 7 chars — what ci-image.yml publishes. Use this.

An 8-char pin names the right commit but no existing image: it satisfies a resolve-and-compare check, then every container: job dies at image-pull with manifest unknown, which reads like a registry outage rather than a one-character pin error. ci-image-pin therefore checks the pin's length as an invariant separate from its correctness, and prints the exact tag to use.

Caveat worth knowing before you trust the 7: ci-image.yml still tags with a plain --short, whose length git auto-scales to the object count. 7 is therefore an empirical property of today's shallow clone, not an enforced invariant — if that count ever crosses git's threshold, the publisher emits 8, the correct pin becomes 8, and the gate's hardcoded 7 goes permanently red demanding a tag with no image behind it. Making the publisher emit --short=7 is tracked as ersatztv#597.

ci-image.yml triggers on pushes to main touching docker/ci/**, workflow_dispatch on any branch, and a weekly Monday 05:00 UTC cron (base-image security updates; Gitea registers schedule only from main). It runs on ubuntu-latest — it was on small until server-management#639, where "docker-only" was found to be a poor proxy for "small": this is a full buildx of the .NET toolchain image, the heaviest job in that lane. Like docker-build.yml, it needs BuildKit's inline http = true for the HTTP registry. Renovate tracks the Dockerfile's image pins (dockerfile manager, see renovate.json).

Three container-specific gotchas — worth knowing if you add a job or a step:

• sh, not bash, is the default shell inside a container:. act_runner runs steps as sh -e {0} (dash) because it can't assume bash exists in an arbitrary image — even though ours has it. Every bashism (set -o pipefail, arrays, shopt, mapfile) then dies instantly with set: Illegal option -o pipefail. docker-build.yml therefore declares a workflow-level defaults: run: shell: bash. If you add a workflow with containerized jobs, do the same — outside a container the shell defaults to bash, so this failure only appears once you containerize and it looks nothing like a shell problem (it surfaced as the migrations job dying in 0.13s).
• actions/checkout clones as root into a mounted workspace, which trips git's "detected dubious ownership" guard and breaks every git call in a step. Fixed in the Dockerfile with git config --global --add safe.directory '*'.
• (defensive, not load-bearing) The ffmpeg base sets ENTRYPOINT ["ffmpeg"] because it ships as an ffmpeg CLI, so the Dockerfile resets ENTRYPOINT/CMD. act overrides the entrypoint anyway (entrypoint=["/bin/sleep" "10800"]), so this is belt-and-braces for anyone running the image by hand — unlike the two above, which are real.

⚠️ A REBASE invalidates the pin. The pin must equal the short sha of the commit that touched docker/ci/**, and a rebase rewrites that commit's sha — so ci-image-pin goes red on a branch that was green before, with a pin that still resolves to a real (now-orphaned) commit and an image that still exists in the registry.

Publishing from a branch is a dispatch, not a push (ersatztv#744)

A branch push of this file's committed form no longer publishes anything. ci-image.yml's push trigger is branches: [main], because Gitea resolves a push workflow's definition from the pushed branch — so an unfiltered trigger meant any branch push touching those paths executed that branch's own YAML, unreviewed, on a docker-capable runner holding the credential that writes ersatztv:prod and the toolchain image five container: jobs run. Credential scoping (ci.actions-credential-scoping) bounds what such a job may do; it never bounded whether it runs.

Read that heading exactly as narrow as it is written. The filter is loaded from the pushed ref like every other line in the file, so a branch that deletes it re-enables the route in one edit. What is closed is the drive-by case: an ordinary push of a legitimate docker/ci change publishing an image nobody asked for, with no deliberate act anywhere in the loop. Against someone who intends to run their own YAML this is not a boundary at all, and citing it as one is the mistake to avoid — see #853, which settled its DISPATCH row; the v* tag-push and pull_request: rows are live in #885.

What this does not close — beginning with this file's own filter, then sorted by REF CLASS rather than by which keyword a trigger carries. docker-build.yml has branches: [main], so a keyword test passes it; it also has tags: ['v*'] and pull_request:, both head-resolved and both reaching the same registry credential. A tag push is outside release.main-direct-push-disabled, so git push origin <commit>:refs/tags/v99.9.9 runs that commit's docker-build.yml and can publish ersatztv:prod — no dispatch needed. Separately, ci-image.yml, docker-build.yml, dependency-scan.yml and renovate.yml all carry an unrestricted workflow_dispatch, which loads its definition from the selected ref. The filter here removes the drive-by route, where merely pushing a branch was enough; it is not a boundary against a malicious writer.

That remaining class was probed and ACCEPTED in #853 — read this before proposing a fix for it. Gitea 1.27.1 has no way to restrict workflow_dispatch by ref (the API takes ref as a required free-form string) and no protected-environment concept to gate a secret behind — zero of its 308 documented API paths mention "environment", and the config file the running server names in its own --config sets only ENABLED and DEFAULT_ACTIONS_URL under [actions]. More to the point, restricting dispatch would close nothing: the pull_request: row above is cheaper than any dispatch, because it runs attacker-authored YAML, which can name any secret in the repo store — not only the ones the committed workflows reference. That is what makes it cover renovate.yml's RENOVATE_TOKEN without dispatching renovate.yml at all. Concretely today, six jobs in docker-build.yml hold REGISTRY_PASSWORD and run on the PR route (toolchain-preflight, test, migrations, functional-e2e, api-docs, format), two of them required contexts — carry that as every job on the PR route that names secrets.REGISTRY_PASSWORD, not as the list, and not as "every container: job" either: toolchain-preflight is container-free and would fall out of that predicate. "Push a branch, open a PR" therefore reaches the credential with no act outside the ordinary contribution flow, where a dispatch costs one. (dependency-scan.yml references no secrets at all.) Full reasoning and the probe: ci.workflow-dispatch-ref-unrestricted. The live residuals are that PR route and the v* tag push, tracked in #885 — along with tag_protections, which is still empty.

A v* tag push does not fire ci-image.yml. There is no tags: key, and a branches: filter is compared against a branch ref — so a release cut no longer republishes the toolchain image as a side effect. The exact matcher semantics are unprobed; the observable claim is the one stated.

The capability removed is real and is not assumed away — it is replaced by workflow_dispatch, which Gitea loads from the branch you select. The constraint to plan around is that ci-image.yml tags git rev-parse --short HEAD, i.e. the branch HEAD at dispatch time, not the commit that touched docker/ci. So the branch-side two-step is:

1. Push the branch with the docker/ci/** change as HEAD. Anything that changes how the image is built — a ci-image.yml edit to build-args, Dockerfile path or platforms — must be in that commit or below it, because the dispatch builds HEAD's whole tree. Commit it afterwards and the published image was built by the old recipe while the pin and expected both name the docker/ci commit, so ci-image-pin is green over an image the merged recipe would not produce.
2. Dispatch ci-image.yml on that branch (Actions → Build CI Toolchain Image → Run workflow → pick the branch). It publishes :<short sha of that HEAD>; :latest stays put, because only main may move it.
3. Commit the pin bump in docker-build.yml on top. HEAD moves, but nothing needs republishing — expected is the docker/ci commit, which the pin now names.

After a rebase, redo all three: the sha is new, so the image must be republished under it. That is the loop ersatztv#445 paid twice when main moved mid-review.

Probed on this instance 2026-08-27, because the whole branch-side path rests on it. Dispatched ci-image.yml on fix/744-ci-image-branch-filter at 43b1e45 (run 2340, conclusion: success). Gitea bound the job to head_branch: fix/744-ci-image-branch-filter / head_sha: 43b1e45b5554…, so it loads both the definition and the tree from the selected non-default ref, and the run published ersatztv-ci:43b1e45 — it tags the branch HEAD at dispatch time, as described above. :latest still resolved to sha256:7baf403c…, the digest it carried before the dispatch. Note the limit of that last check: docker/ci was unchanged, so the rebuild was content-identical and the new :<sha> carries the same digest as :latest. It therefore shows :latest did not CHANGE, and cannot by itself distinguish "not pushed" from "pushed the same digest" — the refs/heads/main guard in the workflow is what makes that decision.

The cheapest way to avoid the rebase loop entirely is still to land a toolchain-image change on its own, before the work that consumes it, so the consuming branch never carries the docker/ci commit through a rebase.

docker/ci/** has no cheap-edit path, comments included. Editing any byte there re-points ci-image-pin's expected at the editing commit, so the five container: pins go stale and a blocking job fails — a one-line comment fix costs a full publish-and-repin, and a rebase charges it again. Ride prose fixes in that directory with the next genuine toolchain bump. The TWO stale publish instructions still in docker/ci/Dockerfile — the PLAYWRIGHT_VERSION bump comment, and the rebase warning's "re-dispatching does not help", which is now the opposite of the documented recovery — are #854, deferred on exactly these grounds.

A change that lives only in ci-image.yml publishes nothing. That file is no longer one of its own trigger paths, nor one of ci-image-pin's expected paths. Those two lists must otherwise name the same sources, and scripts/tests/test_ci_image_paths_pin_agreement.py holds them to it — it derives both from the workflow documents and compares them for set equality, so editing one alone reddens script-tests. That job is not a required context, so the red does not block server-side; it denies the merge-consent auto-grant through the combined status. Read that guard before taking the reversal described next: it models a <dir>/**-against-<dir> pair only, so putting ci-image.yml back into both lists is a file-against-file pair it refuses, and would need a file arm added there first (ersatztv#855). That pairing is a decided tradeoff, not a necessity — keeping the file in expected still works, since the branch dispatch can publish the ci-image.yml commit itself and the pin then matches. What it costs is the reason it went: that route charges a full ~2 GB publish and a five-pin bump for every edit to the file, a comment included, and a rebase charges it again. That price reverted the first attempt (#697) and is why this change was landed alone — also a priced decision, not a rule. The chosen side pays the opposite risk instead, below. The consequence to live with: if you change how the image is built (build-args, Dockerfile path, platforms) without touching docker/ci/**, CI keeps running an image built by the previous recipe and nothing goes red. Make the change alongside a docker/ci/** edit — a comment bump in the Dockerfile is enough. That is not one option of two: publishing after the merge and then pinning does not work, because expected is the last docker/ci commit, so a pin naming the workflow-only commit fails ci-image-pin and leaving the pin where it is keeps consuming the old image. The docker/ci touch is what gives the new recipe a commit the pin is allowed to name.

When the pinned tag disappears

⚠️ An immutable PIN is a promise about what we consume, not about what the registry keeps. It means the jobs never follow a floating tag like :latest, so a fresh toolchain push cannot change what today's CI runs. It does not promise the tag will still EXIST — nor, strictly, that the tag's content is frozen: ci-image.yml tags git rev-parse --short HEAD, so a workflow_dispatch or a weekly no-cache run at the same HEAD republishes that same :<sha> from a rebuilt image. Those are three different claims, and existence is the one that is not ours to make: the registry belongs to server-management, and an owner-level Gitea package cleanup rule there (keep_count 15, remove_days 1, remove_pattern .*, and a keep_pattern that no 7-hex sha can match) deletes any sha tag once 15 newer versions of the package exist. ci-image.yml publishes a new :<sha> weekly and on every push to main touching docker/ci/** (plus every branch dispatch), while the pin only moves when a human bumps it — so a pin ages toward eviction on its own. That is what happened between 2026-08-11 and 2026-08-13 (ersatztv#772): the tag vanished, and every container: job — both required contexts included — died after 1–2s with

Error response from daemon: failed to resolve reference ".../ersatztv-ci:<pin>": not found

buried in each job's log. Nothing said "your toolchain image is gone", so the natural first reading was "my diff broke the build", and that is where the review time went. The durable fix is registry-side and is tracked in timothy/server-management#842; until it lands, assume any pin older than a couple of weeks can evaporate.

How firm that cause is, since it decides whether you go looking further. The rule and its nightly execution are directly observed; the specific deletion is not, because Gitea hard-deletes package versions with no audit row. What ties them is the same rule's fingerprint on the sibling ersatztv package — every :<sha> older than the 15-slot window gone, every keep_pattern tag kept back to 26.3.1. Reproduce both halves on the Gitea host (LXC 119, 192.168.1.95):

# on the Gitea host: the rule itself
sqlite3 /var/lib/gitea/data/gitea.db 'select * from package_cleanup_rule;'
# from anywhere: that the cleanup task is scheduled and has been running (schedule/prev/exec_times)
curl -s -u user:pass 'http://192.168.1.95:3000/api/v1/admin/cron?limit=50' \
  | jq '.[] | select(.name == "cleanup_packages")'

(Do not reach for journalctl -u gitea | grep ExecuteCleanupRules — that identifier reaches the log only via slow-query warnings, so an empty grep on a healthy host would read as "the rule never ran", which is the inverse of what it means.)

If a pin disappears again after #842 changes that rule, treat this cause as refuted rather than re-applying it — something else is deleting tags.

Detection. docker-build.yml::toolchain-preflight (scripts/ci-toolchain-image-resolves.sh) resolves every pin in docker-build.yml against the registry on every run and fails with a message that names the tag. It is container-free by necessity — a job consuming the missing image could not run to report it — and deliberately not a needs: of the five jobs it diagnoses: the container jobs already fail fast, so gating them would tax every green run to speed up a rare red one.

Everything it cannot establish is a FAILURE, not a warning, and the arms are worth knowing because they send you to different places:

Answer	Job	Message says
HTTP 200 with a manifest body	green	resolves
HTTP 404	red	IS GONE — rebuild the tag (recovery above)
HTTP 200, body is not a manifest	red	something is answering for the registry (proxy, login page)
401 / 403	red	the credentials were rejected — fix the secrets
anything else (5xx, unreachable, no curl)	red after ETV_CI_ATTEMPTS tries	could NOT VERIFY — check the registry's health, NOT the pin
ETV_REGISTRY_AUTH unset, malformed, or either half empty	red, before any query	an absent secret interpolates to ":", which is not a credential

The last two rows are the ones worth defending, because warning on them and exiting 0 is the natural way to write this check and it is wrong: a missing curl, a moved registry and a DNS change all land there, and a green-with-a-warning job is indistinguishable from a healthy pin forever after. The unknown arm retries first (ETV_CI_ATTEMPTS, default 3, ETV_CI_RETRY_SECONDS apart) so an ordinary registry blip does not redden a PR — that pause is what makes failing on unknown affordable, and shortening it silently trades this guard for flake.

It is not a needs: of anything, but it is not consequence-free either. The merge-consent hook reads the PR's combined status and denies on a non-success combined state (a skipped context counts as green, ersatztv#593; an advisory red does not, ersatztv#598), so a red preflight blocks the merge exactly like any other red job. "Advisory" would be the wrong word for it — what it does not do is skip the jobs it diagnoses.

Recovery, without needing CI to be healthy. The tag names a commit, and that commit still builds the same image, so the fastest fix is to republish the same tag by hand — no PR, no pin bump, no green CI required, and every open branch recovers at once. Run this on a host with docker and this registry in insecure-registries (bumblebee 192.168.1.99 or jazz 192.168.1.29):

repo=$(pwd)                                  # keep the CURRENT checkout: the pin commit predates
                                             # the preflight script and the verify step below
pin=$(grep -oE 'ersatztv-ci:[0-9a-f]+' .gitea/workflows/docker-build.yml | cut -d: -f2 | sort -u)
git worktree add /tmp/etv-toolchain "$pin"   # the pin IS the commit's short sha
cd /tmp/etv-toolchain

# The registry is HTTP-only and BuildKit does NOT inherit the daemon's insecure-registries, so the
# `docker-container` driver (anything created by `docker buildx create`) will try HTTPS and fail.
# Either build on the default `docker` driver — `docker buildx use default` — or give the container
# driver the same inline config ci-image.yml passes it:
#   [registry."192.168.1.95:3000"]
#     http = true
prev_builder=$(docker buildx inspect 2>/dev/null | awk '/^Name:/{print $2; exit}')
docker buildx use default                    # needs the containerd image store to --push;
                                             # both named hosts have it (checked 2026-08-22)
docker login 192.168.1.95:3000 -u timothy
docker buildx build --platform linux/amd64 --provenance=false \
  -f docker/ci/Dockerfile -t "192.168.1.95:3000/timothy/ersatztv-ci:$pin" --push .

cd "$repo" && git worktree remove /tmp/etv-toolchain
[ -n "$prev_builder" ] && docker buildx use "$prev_builder"   # leave the builder as you found it

Then confirm the tag resolves before re-running anything — the preflight script does exactly this check and takes no arguments. Run it from the CURRENT checkout, not the pin worktree, which is why $repo is kept above:

ETV_REGISTRY_AUTH=user:pass scripts/ci-toolchain-image-resolves.sh

What this rebuild does and does not restore. It restores a working toolchain at that tag, built from that commit's docker/ci — not a bit-identical copy of what was deleted: the base image tags and the apt/NodeSource packages the Dockerfile pulls are mutable, so a rebuild picks up whatever they point at today. That is the same exposure the weekly no-cache cron has by design. Prefer this over the two-step above whenever the pin is missing rather than stale: the two-step exists to move the pin to a NEW image, and running it here would leave the repo pinning a different sha for no reason.

The push path was exercised against this registry on 2026-08-22 — a throwaway docker push of a 13 MB image to timothy/etv-772-recovery-probe:probe1 from bumblebee, HEAD /v2/.../manifests/probe1 → 200, then DELETE /api/v1/packages/timothy/container/etv-772-recovery-probe/probe1 → 204 and the manifest read back 404. Re-run that shape against a scratch package name to re-establish it; what it establishes is the auth + HTTP-registry push path, not the toolchain build itself.

Bumping the pin is enforced, not remembered. The ci-image-pin job (blocking, PR-only; defined in pr-checks.yml, but it greps docker-build.yml where the pins live) fails if docker-build.yml's pin isn't the short sha of the last commit to touch docker/ci/** (since ersatztv#744 that path alone — ci-image.yml is deliberately not part of it), if that pin isn't exactly 7 chars long (see above), or if the five jobs ever pin different tags. This exists because Renovate manages docker/ci/Dockerfile's base pins but cannot bump an opaque :<sha> in container.image — so a Renovate base bump would otherwise publish a new image, test the old one, and merge with the Dockerfile disagreeing with the pin. A red ci-image-pin means: dispatch ci-image.yml on the branch to publish the new :<sha>, then update all five pins to it.

What it is and isn't worth. Measured honestly (ersatztv#390): the image saves ~15–40s per job (setup-dotnet is 8–19s, setup-node 2–5s cached, the two tool installs ~9s) plus the 110s apt-ffmpeg step — roughly 3–8% of runtime. It is not where CI time goes; see the lane table above (queue wait, server-management#604) and ersatztv#398 (742s of redundant compilation). Its durable value is prod-identical ffmpeg, a pinned/consistent toolchain, and making jobs runner-agnostic — the last is what allowed the lane rebalance.

Dockerfile notes (docker/Dockerfile)

• Base image: 192.168.1.95:3000/timothy/ersatztv-ffmpeg:8.1.2 (our Gitea fork of the archived ghcr.io/ersatztv/ersatztv-ffmpeg). FFmpeg 8 base image work landed in ersatztv-ffmpeg#4; app-side compatibility work landed in ersatztv#9.
• Copies Directory.Build.props, Directory.Build.targets, Directory.Packages.props, global.json, .editorconfig before dotnet restore so the image build uses the same MSBuild config, central package versions, SDK pin, and analyzer severities as local/CI builds (it previously copied only *.sln). Directory.Packages.props is required here: under Central Package Management the csproj carry no inline versions, so the image's restore fails (NU1015) without the central manifest.
• amd64-only (the runner/build host is x86_64). No arm32/arm64, no DMG/exe artifacts, no GHCR/DockerHub.
• openapi-generator jar layer ordering (ersatztv#190): the wget for the openapi-generator-cli jar runs before the COPY of ErsatzTV/wwwroot/openapi/, so the ~30MB download layer is cached independently of the openapi spec. Previously the jar was downloaded after that COPY, so any PR touching the spec (e.g. v1.json) busted the download layer too and re-fetched the jar on every such change. Codegen itself still runs after the spec COPY, since it needs both the jar and the spec files.

Dependency management (Central Package Management + scans)

Central Package Management (CPM) — package versions live in a single repo-root Directory.Packages.props (ManagePackageVersionsCentrally=true); the per-project csproj reference packages by name only (no Version=). One source of truth, atomic one-line bumps, and cross-project version drift is structurally impossible. To add or change a dependency, edit the <PackageVersion> entry centrally — never put a Version= back on a <PackageReference> (that trips NU1008). The Docker build must copy this file before restore (see Dockerfile notes). The .mcp/ vendored tool (gitignored, not in the solution) keeps inline versions via a local-only .mcp/Directory.Packages.props opt-out (ManagePackageVersionsCentrally=false). (ersatztv#14)

NuGet audit — .NET 10 runs NuGet audit on restore. Several projects set TreatWarningsAsErrors=true, so vulnerable transitive packages failed the build. Directory.Build.props demotes low/moderate/high advisories (NU1901-1903) to warnings and promotes NU1904 (critical) to an error in every project via WarningsAsErrors. The advisories that prompted this were resolved in ersatztv#8 (NCalcSync→6.x; SQLitePCLRaw bundle 3.x) and ersatztv#314 (Microsoft.OpenApi 2.0.0→2.7.5, GHSA-v5pm-xwqc-g5wc High — direct-pinned in ErsatzTV.csproj over the 2.0.0 that Microsoft.AspNetCore.OpenApi + Scalar.AspNetCore pull transitively; the SQLitePCLRaw override pattern; regenerates the OpenAPI doc byte-identically). The NU1901-1903 demotion is kept by design: criticals (NU1904) still hard-block, while low/moderate/high advisories surface as warnings + via the weekly scan and Renovate security PRs, rather than breaking unrelated PRs the moment a new transitive advisory drops.

Scheduled vulnerability scan — .gitea/workflows/dependency-scan.yml runs weekly (cron 0 6 * * 1) + on workflow_dispatch: dotnet list package --vulnerable --include-transitive over the full solution (incl. Scanner, which the image build strips). dotnet list exits 0 even with findings, so the step (bash -euo pipefail) greps for the "has the following vulnerable packages" marker and fails the run if present. Detection only — it surfaces advisories on a schedule, a Gitea-native stand-in for Dependabot; it does not open update PRs (that's Renovate — server-management#484). Gitea registers schedule triggers only from the default branch, so the cron starts after merge to main; use workflow_dispatch to run on demand. It went green once ersatztv#8 cleared the NCalcSync/SQLitePCLRaw advisories — a red run now means a new advisory has appeared. (ersatztv#14, ersatztv#8)

Renovate (automated update PRs) — .gitea/workflows/renovate.yml runs self-hosted Renovate weekly (cron 0 3 * * 1) + on workflow_dispatch, as a renovate/renovate:43 container job on the shared act_runner. This is the proposing layer the scan above deliberately omits: it opens grouped dependency-update PRs and OSV-driven vulnerability-fix PRs against main, and maintains a Dependency Dashboard issue listing the full backlog. Config is the repo-root renovate.json — managers nuget (via CPM), github-actions, and dockerfile (scoped to the built docker/Dockerfile; it reads the HTTP-only Gitea registry for the ersatztv-ffmpeg base via a RENOVATE_HOST_RULES host rule — insecureRegistry + registry read creds, set in the workflow env, not the committed config). The docker-compose manager is unused (repo compose files are build:-only). Auth: a dedicated renovate Gitea bot (Write collaborator) via repo Actions secrets RENOVATE_TOKEN (bot PAT) + GH_COM_TOKEN (no-scope github.com PAT for changelogs — named GH_, not GITHUB_, a prefix Gitea reserves). Patch bumps to test/dev-only packages (NUnit*, NSubstitute, Shouldly, coverlet, Microsoft.NET.Test.Sdk, Testably.Abstractions*, threading analyzer) auto-merge once the Build & test (.NET) check passes — branch protection on main requires that context; everything else is manual review (ersatztv is prod-bearing). Range-pinned packages (e.g. EF Core [9.0.x,10)) are respected — no v10 jump. PR volume is throttled (prConcurrentLimit 5 + config:recommended's prHourlyLimit 2); tick a dashboard checkbox or raise the limits to drain faster. workflow_dispatch defaults to a safe dry run. Cross-repo rollout tracked in server-management#484. (server-management#484)

Security scanning — black-box DAST + SAST (scripts/security-scan.sh, ersatztv#314)

Every other security check we run is in-ecosystem / white-box — SonarAnalyzer, NetArchTest, the adversarial fork + Codex review passes, the api-docs/format/decisions CI gates, dotnet list package --vulnerable — so they share our blind spots. scripts/security-scan.sh is the out-of-ecosystem, black-box complement and a #197 exit criterion (HARD GATE before remote exposure): it drives the running product from outside our C#/review stack.

• What it does. Boots a throwaway container from the image under test (fresh empty config volume; never the deployed prod/test container — the authenticated active scan sends attack payloads to write endpoints), reads the generated machine key, and runs an authenticated OWASP ZAP API scan (zap-api-scan.py) that imports the static /openapi/v1.json so it exercises every declared /api/v1 operation, injecting X-Api-Key on every request via a ZAP replacer rule so it reaches the [RequiresAuthentication] + RequireKeyForReads surface (not just the /app shell an unauthenticated spider sees). Then a semgrep SAST cross-check (p/security-audit + p/secrets + p/csharp). The container is torn down on exit.
• Where/when. Runs on the docker host (jazz — the Mac has no docker), like migration-smoke.sh: scripts/security-scan.sh [IMAGE] [PORT] (defaults …:latest / 8411). It is a manual release-gate, deliberately not a per-PR CI job — it needs docker + a booted image, takes several minutes, and is noisy (expect to tune, not take raw). The continuous layer is the per-PR white-box gates + the weekly dependency-scan; this is the per-release black-box pass. Re-run it each release and before any change to the exposure posture.
• Exit-code contract (ersatztv#338). zap-api-scan.py's raw exit code is NOT a simple pass/fail — it conflates a clean run with a warnings-only run unless you know its wrapper contract: 0 clean (no FAIL or WARN alerts), 2 WARN-only (triage required, but not release-blocking), 1 FAIL (at least one FAIL-level alert — release-blocking), 124 the script's own timeout wrapper killed a hung post-scan cleanup (the report written before the hang is still usable — triage it), any other code means the scanner/tool itself errored (not a scan result at all). scripts/security-scan.sh encodes this in classify_zap_exit() and prints an unambiguous ==> ZAP result: <PASS|WARN|FAIL| TIMEOUT|TOOL ERROR> ... line; the script's own exit status reflects that classification (0 for clean/WARN, 1 for FAIL/timeout/tool-error) rather than ZAP's raw code, so a warnings-only run no longer reads as a failed scan. Found when the v26.8.0 release scan (#335) returned raw exit 2 for a report with FAIL-NEW: 0 and two known/expected warning classes — the shell result looked like a failure though the release gate had actually passed. Run scripts/security-scan.sh --selftest for a docker-free regression check of the classification logic.
• Triage. Triage each WARN/FAIL finding false-positive vs real. Real, in-scope, go-live-blocking findings get fixed (e.g. the security headers from the #319 baseline; the Microsoft.OpenApi pin above); LAN-expected noise (Private-IP disclosure) is revisited only for genuine remote exposure. nuclei (template-based CVE fingerprinting) is an optional third pass — deferred while its template fetch is blocked in the runner env (pre-seed a template volume to add it); ZAP covers the DAST baseline and semgrep the SAST, so it is not on the critical path.

Static analysis & formatting

Analyzers — Directory.Build.props enables the SDK analyzers at latest-All and turns on Microsoft.VisualStudio.Threading.Analyzers for every centrally managed project. Directory.Build.targets also references Roslynator, SonarAnalyzer.CSharp, Meziantou.Analyzer, and AsyncFixer repo-wide (versions central via CPM). All analyzer package references are guarded on ManagePackageVersionsCentrally, so the gitignored .mcp tool—which deliberately uses inline package versions—does not inherit versionless references. They are introduced incrementally (ersatztv#15). eng/analyzers/sdk-all-suggestion.globalconfig enumerates the .NET 10 SDK All inventory at suggestion; this exact-ID baseline is necessary because the SDK's generated latest-All severities outrank .editorconfig bulk settings. .editorconfig keeps the threading and curated-pack baselines at suggestion. Diagnostics remain visible to IDEs and dotnet format analyzers, but do not create a wall of failures (a direct latest-All trial activated 455 existing errors in the TWAE projects).

Promotion is the enforcement — set a reviewed rule to warning in .editorconfig and append its ID to the central WarningsAsErrors list in Directory.Build.props. The explicit list makes the rule block in every project, including test projects that do not otherwise use TWAE. On a major SDK upgrade, regenerate the checked-in SDK baseline from analysislevel_<major>_all.globalconfig, preserve SDK none entries, and review newly introduced rules before accepting the snapshot.

Promoted rules are recorded here so the blocking subset stays intentional and reviewable:

• Sonar S3981 — warning + WarningsAsErrors (ersatztv#15): rejects collection-count comparisons that are constant regardless of collection size. Its first finding exposed Workers.Count >= 0, which permanently classified scheduled memory releases as busy and skipped the intended aggressive idle collection.

• StyleCop.Analyzers is intentionally excluded: its latest stable (1.1.118) crashes (AD0001) on C# record declarations, and its rules overlap the existing .editorconfig/Roslynator. Revisit via the record-compatible 1.2.0-beta only if specifically wanted.

• The former Blazor .razor caveat is retired: Blazor removal deleted the Razor sources and their temporary Sonar NoWarn list. The .razor/.cshtml suggestion scopes remain in .editorconfig only as a defensive default if server-rendered view code is ever reintroduced.

Formatting — the inherited tree still contains legacy UTF-8 BOM/whitespace debt, so the standing policy is format as you touch, not a mass rewrite (ersatztv#311). The Husky pre-commit hook and the blocking format CI job both run dotnet format whitespace . --folder --verify-no-changes --include <changed .cs> — scoped to the files the commit/PR touches. Untouched legacy files remain outside the gate; .gitattributes pins line endings. A one-time full-tree normalization remains a separate, unmade decision.

Why whitespace . --folder, not the full dotnet format <sln> (ersatztv#469) — the gate only needs to enforce .editorconfig whitespace (indent/EOL/trailing/final-newline) and charset (no UTF-8 BOM). The old recipe (dotnet format ErsatzTV.sln --no-restore --verify-no-changes --include) loaded the entire ~10-project MSBuild workspace and built a Roslyn compilation per project before checking a single file — --include narrows which files are checked, never what gets loaded. Measured whole-solution dotnet format ran ~480s locally; folder mode runs in ~0.5s and needs no dotnet restore (the NuGet-cache + Restore steps were removed from the job). --folder treats the tree as a plain folder of files, skipping MSBuild/Roslyn entirely, and still reads .editorconfig. Verified non-vacuous: it exits non-zero on an injected trailing-whitespace line (error WHITESPACE) and on a prepended UTF-8 BOM (error CHARSET), and exits 0 on a clean file. No coverage was lost: the full dotnet format gate did not enforce the style/analyzer pass either — a probe injecting a warning-severity naming violation (local_constants not ALL_UPPER) passed the full solution format (exit 0): the only .editorconfig rule above :suggestion/:none severity is that one naming rule, and naming violations have no dotnet format batch code-fixer, so --verify-no-changes reports no change regardless of severity. The analyzers that must block (NU1904, S3981) are enforced at compile time via WarningsAsErrors in Directory.Build.props, not by this job. Devs fix a violation with dotnet format whitespace . --folder --include <files> (the full dotnet format ErsatzTV.sln --include <files> is a superset and also works).

Migration integrity (EF Core, both providers)

TvContext (ErsatzTV.Infrastructure/Data/TvContext.cs) has two migration sets — one per provider project: ErsatzTV.Infrastructure.Sqlite/Migrations and ErsatzTV.Infrastructure.MySql/Migrations, each with its own TvContextModelSnapshot. A model change needs a migration in BOTH. Add them with scripts/add-migration.sh <Name> (runs the EF CLI for each provider). The EF CLI pattern (provider selected by the post--- arg, which Startup reads as the provider config key):

dotnet ef <cmd> --context TvContext --startup-project ErsatzTV \
  --project ErsatzTV.Infrastructure.{Sqlite|MySql} -- --provider {Sqlite|MySql}

The migrations job in docker-build.yml runs on every push/PR and, for each provider:

1. dotnet ef migrations has-pending-model-changes — fails if an entity changed without a matching migration (model drift), so a forgotten migration can't merge.
2. dotnet ef database update against a fresh empty DB — applies all migrations in order and fails on any broken/un-orderable one.

• SQLite (the prod provider) uses a throwaway file (ETV_CONFIG_FOLDER=$(mktemp -d)); no service needed. Validated: 787 migrations → 139 tables.
• MySql uses ServerVersion.AutoDetect, which connects at config time, so the job needs a reachable server — provided by a services: mysql:8.4 container (the act_runner uses Docker execution with an auto-created per-job network — service reachable as mysql:3306 (the old bumblebee runner pinned network downloadswarm; relocated in server-management#570)). Connection string via MySql__ConnectionString (→ config key MySql:ConnectionString). Validated: 305 migrations → 137 tables. It's an independent gate (not yet a needs: of the image build) so the new MySql-service dependency can't block image builds until it's proven; promote it to a required check once stable.

Caveat — non-transactional operations: some migrations (e.g. SQLite PRAGMA foreign_keys) run outside a transaction and warn at startup; they can't be rolled back mid-migration, so review such migrations carefully (this is part of what motivated the apply-to-fresh check before the prod cutover, server-management#481).

Resilience — the MySql apply is retried (concurrent-runner contention, not a model bug): both runners (ci-runner VM 127 + bumblebee-runner) serve ubuntu-latest, and when two migration jobs land on the same host at once (common when several PRs push together), each spins its own mysql:8.4 service container and they starve each other — producing intermittent Command Timeout expired or mid-replay MySqlEndOfStreamException (dropped connection) on the MySql apply-to-fresh-DB step. This is pure infra flakiness — has-pending-model-changes (the actual model check) still passes, and the same commit passes on a quieter host. The job hardens against it two ways: the connection string sets DefaultCommandTimeout=300 (up from MySqlConnector's 30s default), and the apply is wrapped in a 3× retry that resumes from __EFMigrationsHistory (EF commits each migration in its own transaction, so an interrupted one rolls back and the retry continues). A real migration failure fails deterministically on every attempt, so the retry never masks it. If a run still flakes past the retry, re-trigger (Gitea has no rerun API on this version — push, or the run drains); don't treat a lone MySql-apply red as a code problem without checking the failure mode.

Migration-on-prod-copy smoke — release path (scripts/migration-smoke.sh, ersatztv#315)

The migrations job above only proves a migration is well-formed against a fresh, empty DB. It can't prove it applies cleanly to the accumulated prod SQLite — real row volume, historical values, and the post-migration data steps ErsatzTV runs on startup: DatabaseMigratorService (a BackgroundService) applies pending migrations, then DbInitializer.Initialize + PopulatePathHashes (an UPDATE over the real MediaFile table). A migration green on a fresh DB can still fail or corrupt on prod, and today you'd only find out mid-deploy after the container recreates.

scripts/migration-smoke.sh rehearses it on a throwaway copy of the latest prod backup — it never touches the live DB:

scripts/migration-smoke.sh --image <ref-about-to-be-promoted> [--db <backup.sqlite3>] [--timeout 180]

It copies the backup into a temp config dir, boots the new image against it (ETV_CONFIG_FOLDER), and gates PASS on the Done applying database migrations log line — not merely on HTTP readiness, since the migrator runs concurrently with Kestrel, so the web server can serve before/while migrations run. FAIL = the container exits before finishing, a migration exception appears in the logs, migrations don't finish within --timeout, or the app won't serve /iptv/channels.m3u afterwards. The smoke container, the DB copy, and the temp dir are always torn down on exit (the ErsatzTV image runs as root, so cleanup deletes its root-owned config files from inside a throwaway root container — otherwise each run would leak the multi-hundred-MB copy). Exit 0 = clean, 1 = migration/boot failure, 2 = usage error.

• --db default: the newest ersatztv.sqlite3 under $ETV_BACKUP_DIR (default ~/downloadswarm/ersatztv-backups — where the host-side pre-deploy backup hook writes timestamped snapshots). Pass --image = the version tag about to be promoted.
• Where it runs: it's meant to run on the docker host as a Komodo pre-deploy step (which already produces the backup — see "Cutting a release" and the #553 pre-deploy backup caveat), so a bad migration aborts the promote before the live container recreates. Wiring it into that hook is a server-management concern (cross-repo — this repo owns the script + docs, server-management owns the Komodo hook). Until wired, run it by hand before cutting a migration-bearing release.
• Validated live 2026-07-12: :latest against a copy of the 283 MB prod backup → migrations applied cleanly, app booted and served, temp dir removed.

Pre-commit hooks (web/)

The repo uses husky git hooks (installed via web/'s lint-staged + npm) to catch lint/format/type/API-drift errors locally, before they reach CI. Because the git root and the npm project dir differ (monorepo: no root package.json, the JS/TS project lives entirely in web/), the wiring is:

• husky + lint-staged are devDependencies of web/package.json (not a root package — there isn't one).
• The committed hook scripts live at the repo root: .husky/pre-commit, .husky/pre-push, .husky/commit-msg.
• web/package.json's prepare script (cd .. && husky) runs on npm install inside web/ and points git at the repo-root .husky dir (git config core.hooksPath .husky/_ — the _ subdir is husky's generated internal dir, gitignored via its own .husky/_/.gitignore; only the hook scripts themselves are committed). This works because npm keeps web/node_modules/.bin on PATH for the prepare script even after it cd ..s to the repo root (which husky's init requires — it hard-checks for .git in the current directory).

The four hooks:

1. pre-commit — (a) cd web && npx lint-staged: runs eslint --fix on staged web/src/**/*.{ts,tsx} files, then a project-wide npm run typecheck (tsc -b isn't file-scoped, so it runs the full check, but only when a .ts/.tsx file is staged); (b) back at the repo root, if any *.cs files are staged, dotnet format ErsatzTV.sln --verify-no-changes --include <staged .cs> — a formatting violation blocks the commit. The .cs step is skipped entirely when no .cs is staged, so web-only commits don't pay the sln-load cost; when it does run it's scoped to the staged files (~6-7s wall in practice, dominated by the workspace load); (c) H3 (ersatztv#303) — refuses a staged root-level *.png (git diff --cached --name-only | grep -E '^[^/]+\.png$'), belt-and-suspenders with the .gitignore screenshot rule so a forced git add -f still can't land a review/debug screenshot at the repo root. Nested *.png (real assets) pass; (d) decision lifecycle validator (ersatztv#521, supersedes the ersatztv#303 H9 append-only mechanic) — runs .claude/hooks/decisions-guard.sh (no args; a fail-open shim around scripts/decisions_validate.py), the structural checks over the working tree (metadata well-formedness, one active record per key, reciprocal links). It has no base/head here, so the body-diff/no-vanish checks it also knows about are skipped locally and only run in the CI decisions lifecycle job, which has a PR base to diff against.
2. pre-push — CI-parity gate: cd web && npm run check:api && npm run lint && npm run typecheck && npm run build. check:api guards generated-OpenAPI drift (ErsatzTV/wwwroot/openapi/v1.json → web/src/api/generated/v1.d.ts); the full lint/typecheck/build catch a staged change that breaks an unstaged file (lint-staged only sees staged files). Any failure blocks the push.
3. commit-msg — enforces the CLAUDE.md protocol: the message must carry a Co-Authored-By: trailer, else the commit is rejected (merge commits are exempt, detected via git rev-parse --verify MERGE_HEAD). The decision-lifecycle check lives in pre-commit (above), not here — the Decisions-Edit: trailer is read from the commit message, but only by the CI decisions lifecycle job's body-diff step (range mode over the PR's merge-base diff), which is the only place a base/head range exists to diff against.

• Worktree/subdir gotcha: git exports GIT_DIR (and friends) while running hooks. In a worktree or any subdir, an explicit GIT_DIR makes nested git commands mislocate the working tree — pre-push's check:api (git diff --exit-code, run from web/) then silently reports "no diff" and lets drift through. pre-push therefore unsets GIT_DIR GIT_WORK_TREE GIT_INDEX_FILE first. (pre-commit's .cs collection uses git diff --cached, index-vs-HEAD, which needs only GIT_DIR and is unaffected.)
• Practical effect: a fresh web/ npm install (after cloning or pulling this change) installs all four hooks automatically — no separate setup step. Commits that touch only non-web/, non-.cs files skip linting/formatting (lint-staged no-ops with nothing to run, the .cs step is skipped).

Registry

Gitea Packages, HTTP-only at 192.168.1.95:3000. the ci-runner VM's Docker daemon (192.168.1.127) has it as an insecure-registry (server-management#172; runner relocated off bumblebee in #570). Images: 192.168.1.95:3000/timothy/ersatztv:<tag>.

Test / prod environments

Container/compose wiring lives in server-management (project boundary): test ersatztv-test on 8410 (:latest), prod ersatztv on 8409 (:prod). See server-management#481 for the full spec (registry pull on the docker host, volumes, Jellyfin isolation for test, Watchtower/manual promotion).

Retired upstream workflows

The upstream .github/workflows/ (ci.yml, docker.yml, artifacts.yml, release.yml, pr.yml, issue-stale.yml) were removed — they targeted GHCR/DockerHub + Azure/Apple signing and called reusable workflows at dead ersatztv/ersatztv@main paths, and ran as noise (incl. a daily stale-issue cron) on the Gitea runner. Upstream is archived, so there are no future merges to preserve them for. The dead .github/dependabot.yml and FUNDING.yml (upstream-pointed) were also removed.

Known follow-ups

• Pin third-party actions to commit SHAs (currently floating major tags cloned from github.com at runtime) — low priority for a homelab; tracked informally.