The bare-VERSION branch left the top heading unconstrained on purpose — both
ceremony shapes have to stay legal, which is the rig#44 / cast#108 lesson. A
review round on the sibling fix found the gap that asymmetry leaves: a tree
with VERSION bumped, '## Unreleased' still populated on top, and no stamped
section for that version makes the wrong-number test false on its first
clause, short-circuits, and passes. release.yml then refuses at publish time
— after the merge, on main, with the release already half-shipped.
So the bare branch now also requires the section it is about to publish to
exist and be non-empty, asserted by running release-notes.sh itself so the
guard and the publisher cannot drift over what a section is. The message is
distinct from the wrong-number case: a missing stamp is not a misnumbered
one. Matches heavy-duty/rig#67.
test/release.sh constructs the half-ceremony tree and the stamped-but-empty
tree and drives the real script at both — all three new assertions fail
against the previous guard — while the re-armed and un-re-armed ceremony
trees stay green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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