All three are the reporting and release path misreporting its own work. No
customer machine, no backup, no restore, no data. The restore-test itself and
when it runs are unchanged.
R-189 — a passing restore-test no longer vanishes on a restart. restore_tests[]
came only from the in-memory store, whose comment ("lost on restart; the cadence
re-populates") was true under a timer and stopped being true when R-86 made the
agent refuse to re-test a proven archive: the proof is then not repeated for a
whole archive generation. Observed live — a 14.5 GB offsite PASS reached no
host-report because the agent was restarted 2m43s later. RestoreTestState now
carries tier + verified beside the archive and renders reportable entries; the
collector merges them, one per tier, newest by TestedAt. It refuses to lie: a
record missing archive-or-tier produces no entry, and run mechanics are not
re-invented. Only successes are persisted, and the asymmetry is now written where
it will be read.
R-188 — a correct release stops emailing a failure. Only the tag PUSH moved
(build -> tag locally -> publish -> push tag): the push wakes CI, and a tag
visible before its package made the gate correctly fail a correct release about
half the time. The old order's invariant is asserted directly instead — the gate
now refuses a published version with no tag, as a bounded probe that prints its
own coverage, because the package listing api is still 401 without a token.
R-186 — a released binary can be verified by rebuilding it. -trimpath
-buildvcs=false: same source, same bytes, tag or no tag. Measured. publish-agent's
fallback also forced CGO_ENABLED=0 and produced a 74 KB different binary for the
same version; both paths now build identically. CLAUDE.md records the command.
NO VERSION BUMP and nothing built: no Go code changed. The agent stays v0.120.0.
scripts/release-agent.sh — THE way to release. build -> tag -> publish -> verify
by INDEPENDENT download. Publishing was a separate remembered step and was
forgotten three times in five days (R-111's 17 stranded releases, 0.114.0, and
0.120.0 — deployed to both demo hosts and undownloadable, so a documented-path
reinstall would have silently downgraded them WHILE REPORTING SUCCESS). R-111's
own closing line named this leg and closed SHIPPED without it; it recurred the
same afternoon, which is the evidence that a note is not a mechanism.
It tags because felhom-host-install.sh now fetches the sixteen agent config
files from raw/tag/v<version>/ (R-183): a released version with no tag 404s a
box mid-install, as root, on a virgin machine. It verifies by downloading what
it just published and comparing the sha to what it built — the publish step's
own success is a report on its own write; a fetch returning the right bytes is
a different claim. It refuses a dirty/unpushed tree and refuses to re-release an
existing version. It does NOT vouch: that points machines at a version and stays
the operator's act.
scripts/check-published-versions.py — the gate. Every v<semver> tag must have a
downloadable package AND a tag tree serving the agent's configs. Registered as
NOT --fast (needs network; a push must not fail because Gitea blinked), and the
CI workflow now runs the FULL gate set instead of --fast — otherwise the gate
would have been registered and never run, the built-but-never-wired failure this
project has shipped four times.
The invariant is not the one specified, and the reason was measured, not assumed:
the hub artifact manifest is 401 without a per-customer passphrase and Gitea's
package LISTING api is 401 without a token, while the package DOWNLOAD url and
the git TAGS api are anonymous. So CI cannot ask "what is vouched" without an
operator credential — whose addition is the operator's call. The tag-based
invariant needs none and catches all three recorded instances. What it does not
catch (the hub vouching a version never released at all) is filed as R-184.
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