cast/CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

History before 0.1.0 lives in git — cast has said 0.1.0 in package.json since its first commit, but grew its release surface (this file, cast --version, tagged releases with a prebuilt asset) on the way to actually cutting it, and this file starts there.

Unreleased

Changed

• PR labels split into two axes: state:* (whose ball) and blocker:* (what is in the way) (heavy-duty/box#138) — state:needs-rebase is retired, replaced by blocker:conflict, blocker:ci-red and blocker:unrequested. One rule joins the axes: state:needs-human requires zero blockers.

  The entry below this one, added a day ago, closed by noting that cast had not yet been bitten only because nothing had conflicted — that three PRs sat at state:needs-human at once and would conflict through this very file the moment one landed. #128 landed. A dry sweep now finds #119, #120 and #122 all still wearing state:needs-human over branches GitHub calls CONFLICTING, which is the predicted failure arriving on schedule.

  Fixing that is what the previous entry did. What this one fixes is the shape that kept regrowing it. The single-label design projected independent facts — mergeability, check status, where the review round stands — onto one totally-ordered value, and a total order must pick a winner, so the rest silently vanish. Every precedence bug this machine has had lived on that ordering: needs-human surviving a conflict, MISSING swallowing STALE, and state:needs-rebase firing on both a conflict and a red check when those need opposite work — telling an agent to rebase when what it owed was a bug fix. Blockers are a set. A set has no precedence between its members to get wrong, and what remains on the ordered axis is purely about reviews, the one place an ordering actually means something.

  state:bots-reviewing tightens with it, to mean strictly a request is live and an answer is coming. A ready PR nobody was asked to review used to read "waiting on the reviewers" for the 48 hours it took the stale sweep to notice; it is now state:addressing + blocker:unrequested, because the ask is the agent's to make. Drafts are exempt, and so is an explicit human request — a maintainer claiming a PR early is deliberate, not a dropped ball.

  The reconciler carries a RETIRED array and strips state:needs-rebase on sight, so retiring a label heals the board instead of stranding one that nothing recomputes. A verdict is owed in two shapes and both raise blocker:unrequested: MISSING (nobody reviewed) and STALE (everybody reviewed an older head). Fixtures 51 → 72.

Fixed

• A label the repo does not have no longer takes the whole edit down with it — gh issue edit --add-label rejects the entire call on one unknown name, applying nothing. Batching state and blockers into a single edit (for anti-flicker) meant one missing blocker:* would also drop the state:* convergence, and the taxonomy was only created by a manual workflow_dispatch — so the first sweep after this change would have healed nothing on precisely the PRs it exists to fix, surfacing only as a log line. The add side is now filtered against the repo's real label set, read once per sweep. Removals need no filter (they are built from has_label, so they provably exist), and an unreadable label set filters nothing rather than everything — a failed read must not silently strip the board. A missing state label skips only the label edit, not the rest of the PR: clearing a stale merge-next and the staleness sweep depend on no part of the state:* taxonomy, and a cold-start repo that skipped them would leave "merge this one next" sitting on a PR the board had moved to the agent — the same false invitation, one scope smaller.

• An unreadable check rollup is no longer read as "nothing is failing" — when gh pr view failed, the fallback left the statusCheckRollup key absent, and (.statusCheckRollup // []) collapsed that into the same NONE as a PR that genuinely has no checks. NONE blocks nothing, so an API hiccup presented as mergeable-by-a-human — the unknown-certified-as-green shape this machine exists to stop, surviving in the one place the #128 fix never looked. checks_state now returns UNREADABLE for the absent key, distinct from NONE for a present-but-empty array, and the sweep leaves that PR exactly as it is rather than recomputing on facts it did not read. Deliberately not a blocker: blocking would flap the whole board on one bad call, and the next tick is 15 minutes away.

• state:needs-human no longer appears on PRs a human cannot merge (#127, heavy-duty/box#136) — decide_state() derived state from three inputs (draft flag, requested reviewers, submitted reviews) and read nothing about mergeability or checks. Combined with the if requested "$HUMAN" short-circuit at the top of its precedence, the label was sticky: once the maintainer was requested, the PR read state:needs-human through conflicts, through red CI, through a force-push that staled every approval. Nothing demoted it.

  In this repo the second half is the live one: three PRs currently sit at state:needs-human simultaneously, with nothing saying which to merge first — and they will conflict through CHANGELOG.md the moment one lands. The stickiness has not bitten here yet only because nothing has conflicted; the code carried it identically, so the first merge would have reproduced box's situation exactly.

  The rule the label now keeps is that state:needs-human means a human could merge this right now, so anything making that false outranks the request that put it there. A CONFLICTING branch or a failing check is the agent's to fix: new state:needs-rebase. Approvals staled by a push mean nobody reviewed this tree: state:addressing, because the agent owes a re-request. An unfinished round still yields to an explicit human request — a maintainer pulling a PR to themselves early is deliberate, and MISSING (nobody has reviewed yet) is a different fact from STALE (everyone reviewed something else). Precedence is applied to the round as a whole, after every verdict is collected: deciding inside the loop let the order of BOTS pick the answer, so a round that was both unfinished and staled returned on the MISSING before any later bot's STALE was read — and came out needs-human over a head nobody had reviewed, the original bug wearing a different hat.

  Whether a check blocks is judged by listing the outcomes that don't — SUCCESS, NEUTRAL, SKIPPED, and the pending set — rather than the outcomes that do. The rollup mixes two closed enums (CheckRun.conclusion and StatusContext.state), and an outcome the list forgets is one the label cannot certify as mergeable: ERROR, CANCELLED and STALE all read as green under an allow-list of failures. The costs are not symmetric — a false failure parks the PR on the agent, who looks; a false success invites a human to merge a tree that will not merge. Superseded runs are dropped first, each context collapsing to its newest entry: a re-run does not evict the run it replaced, and the rollup keeps both. That shape is live on this board — this PR's own tip carried two scope and two reconcile entries — and on heavy-duty/box#137's tip the superseded half was CANCELLED, so once CANCELLED blocks, judging every entry rather than the newest would strand every re-run PR in needs-rebase.

  Dating a run turned out to be the subtle half, and getting it wrong restored the bug. A run still in flight has no completion, but gh does not omit the field — its Go struct marshals the zero time as "0001-01-01T00:00:00Z", a string, which jq's // will not fall through. Ordering on completion therefore sorted the live re-run below every finished one and let the collapse discard it, judging the very run it superseded: a green context with a replacement mid-flight read SUCCESS — the original bug restored, pointing a human at a disabled merge button — and a CANCELLED original whose replacement was still running read FAILURE, the flap the collapse exists to prevent. So a run is dated by when it began, with both spellings of absent discarded (null, and the zero sentinel) and a fallback only for a run that never recorded a beginning — not by the newest stamp of any kind, which compares the completion of a finished run against the start of a live one. Those are different quantities, and a run cancelled by the concurrency group does not stop the instant its replacement starts: the runner winds down, so a predecessor routinely finishes after its successor began, and dating by "newest stamp" let the dead run out-rank the live one that replaced it. An entry carrying no usable timestamp at all sorts last rather than first: something undateable is most likely the thing just created, and every ambiguity here resolves toward "not settled" rather than toward a stale success.

  UNKNOWN mergeability is deliberately not treated as unmergeable: GitHub reports it for about a minute after every merge while it recomputes, and flapping every open PR through needs-rebase on each merge would be worse than the bug. A failed read of either fact degrades to the same "do not know" value, for the same reason.

  Also adds merge-next — the label this repo needs most today, since a correct needs-human still does not say which of three ready PRs to merge first. Queue order is intent, so the reconciler never sets it; it only clears it once the PR stops being mergeable-by-a-human. Ported from heavy-duty/box#137 so the three repos' reconcilers stay byte-identical; both live shapes, the mixed round, the in-flight run superseding a finished one — in both spellings of an absent completion, in both directions, and across the wind-down window where the two overlap — and the whole check-outcome enum are pinned in test/labels-reconcile.sh (fixtures 19 → 51).

0.1.1 — 2026-07-19

Fixed

• The release ceremony re-arms the changelog, and CI notices when it doesn't (#113) — stamping ## Unreleased into ## X.Y.Z — DATE is done by hand in the ceremony PR; no workflow writes this file, and nothing put the heading back. So main sat with the shipped section on top and no ## Unreleased above it — this repo's state from 0.1.0 until this entry. A PR authored before a release and merged after has its entry land under whatever heading now occupies that position: the release that already shipped. Git does that cleanly. The stamped heading and the incoming entry never overlap textually, so the one signal an author trusts — "git told me to look" — is missing exactly when the result is wrong. rig watched it happen (heavy-duty/rig#66, the origin of this fix): an entry landed inside published ## 0.1.0 an hour after 0.1.0 shipped, and was caught only because someone was reading. The published release body is never at risk — release.yml extracts notes from the tree at the tag, before anything late can merge — which is also why nobody notices: the file that drifts is the one only maintainers read. Three moves. ## Unreleased is back above ## 0.1.0 (this entry re-creating it is the repair). CONTRIBUTING's ceremony step now re-arms in the same diff that stamps. And test/release.test.ts keys the rule to package.json: a stamped top section is legal while the version is bare — the ceremony's own tree, and main until the -dev bump — but once the version says -dev, the top section must be ## Unreleased. That is the distinction #108 had to collapse to make the ceremony shippable at all, recovered rather than reverted: the ceremony stays green at every step, and a disarmed dev main goes red. The re-arm also forced the older extraction guard to move. It asserted that the top section extracts non-empty, which the re-armed ceremony tree — a deliberately empty ## Unreleased above the stamp — makes false by construction: the re-arm and the guard would have contradicted each other, and the next release PR would have been unshippable for a second time, the way #108 was. Keying to the top section was only ever a stand-in for "the section release.yml will publish", so the assert now names that section directly — on a bare version the ## X.Y.Z being shipped, on a -dev tree the newest stamped one. Existence is checked with it: a bare version with no matching section is a bump that never stamped, which used to pass every test and fail only after the merge, in release.yml's notes step, past the ship decision and leaving main with a minted, unreleased version to repair by hand. A double re-arm — two ## Unreleased headings, the extracted section silently the empty one — is red too. box and rig carry the same fix (heavy-duty/box#110, heavy-duty/rig#67); rig#67 retargeted the identical assert for the identical reason.

0.1.0 — 2026-07-19

Fixed

• The release suite accepts the ceremony's own tree (#108) — test/release.test.ts demanded the real CHANGELOG.md's literal Unreleased section extract non-empty and contain #96: false by construction on the release: X.Y.Z tree the ceremony's own PR produces (it stamps that heading into ## X.Y.Z — date), so the first real release PR turned CI red and the flow blocked itself — invisible to the fork rehearsals, which tag a branch (release.yml runs; ci.yml never does). The guard now asserts its actual purpose: whatever the TOP ## section is — Unreleased between releases, the stamped version on and right after one — the exact release-notes.sh the workflow runs extracts it non-empty. rig's twin is heavy-duty/rig#44.

• apply no longer demands a GitHub App for a manifest that declares no applications (#103) — found live in the 2026-07-19 release drill, where a databases-only manifest (applications: {}) rendered its plan of two creates and then died in preflight on no GitHub App bound, over a binding nothing in the run would ever have used: a GitHub App exists to clone application source, cast reads it in exactly one call (the application create), and databases and services never touch it. That unconditional resolution gated infra-only projects — the databases a fleet's other projects share — behind the GitHub-App browser-registration ceremony for no reason. apply now resolves the App only when the desired state actually contains an application; a manifest that does declare one still refuses on a missing binding exactly as before, clean plan or not, because that binding is state the next create will need.

• A manifest with no ${…} refs applies without a store (#104) — the greenfield manifest-first bootstrap was a chicken-and-egg with no exit, found by the 2026-07-19 release drill against two fresh Coolify 4.1.2 instances: a registered project whose manifest declared databases only (zero ${…} refs) could not take its first apply — apply refused with no secret store for <org>/<repo> in <env>, and capture, the documented way to get a store, rightly refuses a project that is absent on the box, because apply is the verb that would create it. The drill unblocked with a hand-rolled empty store (printf '' | age -r … -o secrets/….env.age), documented nowhere. Now diff/apply gate that refusal on the manifest actually referencing a secret, asked via the same parser resolution uses: when the templates resolve zero ${…} refs, an absent store is treated as empty and the run proceeds, printing a loud one-line note naming the path the store would live at — and since there is nothing to decrypt, the age key is not demanded either. The moment any template gains a ${…} ref, the refusal returns byte-identical to before. capture and destroy are untouched.

• CAST_AGE_KEY_FILE_<ENV> is now settable for every environment name (#102) — <ENV> was the name uppercased verbatim, so env drill-b advertised CAST_AGE_KEY_FILE_DRILL-B: a variable no POSIX shell can export, which walled off the injected-key channel (and its process-substitution trick) for every hyphenated environment. Found live in the 2026-07-19 release drill. Characters outside [A-Z0-9] now map to _ — env drill-b reads CAST_AGE_KEY_FILE_DRILL_B — and the refusal advertises the mapped name. The standing-key path keeps the exact environment name, so two names that collide on the variable still resolve their own keys on disk.

Added

• Merging a release-labeled PR is the release — and the release re-arms main itself (#111; box#96's design) — release.yml now also fires on pushes to main (not pull_request events: fork-sourced ceremony PRs get a read-only token there — the round-1 catch). A decide step reads the version transition from the push (event.before → the pushed head) and answers four states: release-flow work merged under the release label — -dev endstates, and the post-release window — no-ops green with a NOTICE; the two genuinely ambiguous bare states refuse loudly; a true transition then requires a merged, release-labeled PR behind the commit (read via the API — the label is the operator's declared intent) before the door opens. It then tags the merge commit, builds the cast-X.Y.Z.tgz asset once, publishes — and bumps main to X.Y.(Z+1)-dev itself, direct push with a loud open-a-PR fallback, so no follow-up bump PR exists on the paved road. The tag-push path stays as the documented fallback and backfill, and both paths run the same steps so they cannot drift. First-release edge: 0.1.0 never carried -dev, so its ceremony (#110) ships by manual tag; the automation applies from 0.1.1 on.

• Tagged releases with a prebuilt dist asset, and an installer that installs them (#96) — the cast half of the flow designed in heavy-duty/box#83, plus the piece unique to cast: a prebuilt asset, because cast is the one repo where the source tarball is not the package. A release is a PR, then a tag: the release: X.Y.Z PR bumps package.json (and package-lock.json) and stamps this file's Unreleased section with version + date; the merge commit is tagged bare X.Y.Z (box's tag scheme — no v prefix). release.yml turns the tag into the GitHub release — after asserting tag == package.json version (a mismatch fails loudly and creates nothing) — with that version's section of this file as the body, extracted by the same .github/scripts/release-notes.sh the test harness drives, and with the runnable tree attached as cast-X.Y.Z.tgz: bin/, compiled dist/, production node_modules/, package.json, built once in CI (npm ci && npm run build && npm prune --omit=dev). install.sh now defaults to the latest release: the tag is resolved by following the releases/latest redirect and reading the Location header — no API, no token — and the download is that release's asset, so no npm ci, no tsc, no devDependencies ever run on the operator's machine. CAST_REF picks the other two channels: a tag pins a release (its asset first, source as the fallback for a ref that has none — refs/tags outranks a same-named branch), a branch (CAST_REF=main) tracks the development tree and is the one channel that still builds from source, the only place npm is required. Until 0.1.0 is cut the default channel has nothing to resolve and dies saying exactly that, naming CAST_REF=main as the way to install today — it never falls back to main silently, because "I installed the latest release" must not quietly mean "I installed whatever main was that second". The channel only decides which tree arrives and whether it is built here — whatever it fetched lands in the versioned layout (versions/<package.json version>, current flipped atomically) like any other install.