box#95 taught the family that a forgotten manual tag is the worst
failure shape: silent, no red X, a release that simply doesn't happen.
The ship decision already lives in the ceremony PR — the one whose whole
diff is the version leaving -dev, carrying the reviews and the
maintainer's merge — so tagging after it is transcription, and
transcription belongs to the machine (box#96's design; this is cast's
twin).
release.yml now also triggers on pull_request closed against main,
gated on merged == true AND the hand-set release label. The merge path
asserts four facts in order, each fail-loud and creating nothing: the
merged package.json version is non--dev (read via node, never regex —
the pkg_version discipline); the version CHANGED in this PR (base vs
merge — the -dev interlock, so a mislabeled ordinary PR fails loudly);
the version's changelog section extracts non-empty via the existing
release-notes.sh; and no tag or release exists yet (idempotent re-runs,
and the loud answer to a manual-tag race). Then, in the same job, it
tags the merge commit via the API and publishes. Same-job is
load-bearing: a GITHUB_TOKEN-created tag triggers no workflows, so the
tag-push path cannot fire on it and double-publish.
Both trigger paths converge on literally the same steps — each entry
step exports RELEASE_VERSION, and the notes extraction, the exact
existing asset build (npm ci, npm run build, npm prune --omit=dev,
staged as cast-X.Y.Z/), and the gh release create read only that — so
the paths cannot drift and the installer keeps finding the one asset
name it knows, cast-X.Y.Z.tgz. The tag-push path survives as the
documented manual fallback and backfill, and it matters immediately:
0.1.0 never carried -dev (cast predates the ritual), so the interlock
correctly does not fire for #110's ceremony — that one ships by manual
tag, and the automation applies from 0.1.1 on.
test/release.test.ts pins the new wiring in the house grep style,
fail-closed: the merged+labeled gate, the four asserts strictly ordered
ahead of tag/build/publish, the single job, the anti-recursion comment,
and that no per-path asset name exists. CONTRIBUTING.md's Releasing now
says it plainly: merge is the ship decision; the tag is the fallback.
Fixes#111
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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