ceremony/drills

Drills

What a drill means in this repo: an end-to-end rehearsal of both doors of the release workflow on a disposable repo. The contract suite proves every decision offline — facts → decide → notes against fixtures, the merge door's step sequence replayed in release-exercise.yml — but the doors themselves only ever run live: gating on a real push event, the tag create, the publish, the -dev re-arm (release.yml's "what is honestly untested"). The drill is where they run live before a version rests on them.

The rehearsal

1. Create a scratch private repo. It is disposable by design — but the disposal is split, because the builder cannot perform the delete: at the end the builder archives it (PATCH /repos/{owner}/{repo} with archived: true, inside the repo scope every fleet identity holds), and deleting it is the operator's step — delete_repo is deliberately absent from bot tokens, fleet doctrine and not a misconfiguration, so no builder that will ever run a drill can do it. Do not retry the delete and do not wait on it: both 0.2.0 drills ended at that wall independently (#135) — one builder held its release draft in state:building re-trying a 403 that cannot succeed, the other wrote a record asserting a delete that had not happened. Cleanup gates nothing — not ready-for-review, not the review panel, not the merge. The archived leftover is safe to leave: private, no consumers, and outside heavy-duty/ceremony's ref namespace — the namespace the "never a branch named like the tag" rule below protects.

2. Install the docs/CONSUMERS.md caller stubs, pinned to a fork ref carrying the release candidate tree. The candidate's CEREMONY_SELF_REF is by construction the tag this release has not created yet, so the consumer path cannot resolve directly from the candidate. Rewrite that pin to a canonical candidate SHA in every carrier on the fork ref, and record the fork ref and rewritten pin in the drill record.

   Never create a branch named like the tag on heavy-duty/ceremony to paper over this deadlock: it would shadow the tag for every consumer until someone remembers to delete it. The 0.1.0 drill (#11) is the worked example of this standing fork-ref shape.

3. Give it a fixture VERSION / CHANGELOG.md / changelog.d/ / drills/ in the armed state (X.Y.Z-dev, the fragments directory with its README.md marker plus at least one fragment for the ceremony to consume).

4. Exercise both doors, one probe at a time:

   1. a merge-door ceremony publishes exactly one release and re-arms main to -dev;
   2. a mislabeled ordinary PR is a green NOTICE no-op;
   3. a bare-version PR without the release label refuses;
   4. a re-run of the completed ceremony refuses;
   5. a tag-door release from a manual tag;
   6. a mismatched tag refuses.

   Every refusal must refuse creating nothing — a probe that leaves a tag or a release behind on a refusal path is a failed probe.

The record

One file per version, drills/X.Y.Z.md — the shape the siblings use: what was run, where, the result of each probe, failures written down plainly. The record is the evidence; the scratch repo is the evidence's scaffolding. The record names the scratch repo by full owner/name and states its disposal state as its author observed it when the record was written — archived and pending the operator's delete, or deleted only if the author genuinely performed the delete. Never a disposal the author did not observe: the record is the only thing that survives the drill, and 0.2.0's record shipped its first draft asserting a cleanup that had not happened (#135) — false evidence in the one file whose job is to be evidence.

A record has one of three shapes. A rehearsal records the disposable-repo run above. Doors unchanged records the mechanically checked claim below when a new rehearsal would execute the same bytes as the last one. WAIVED records a maintainer's judgement under the standing paragraph below. If the doors-unchanged conditions do not all hold, the release owes a rehearsal or a waiver; the narrower shape is never a substitute for either.

Doors unchanged

The builder may assert that no disposable-repo rehearsal is owed only when all three conditions below hold at the candidate head. The release PR's panel verifies the claim like any other evidence, and if any reviewer rules a full drill owed, that verdict wins.

1. git diff <last-rehearsed-tag>..HEAD -- <release-path> contains no change except the CEREMONY_SELF_REF pin line in .github/workflows/release.yml.
2. The release path is exactly the output of .github/scripts/release-path.sh: .github/workflows/release.yml, bin/, lib/version.sh, lib/decide.sh, lib/facts.sh, and lib/changelog.sh. The script is the record author's copy-paste source; its contract test keeps this inline list and the workflow's direct and transitive dependencies in agreement.
3. The last rehearsed tag's own record is a full rehearsal, its release is published, and main was re-armed to -dev after it.

The baseline is the last rehearsed tag, never merely the previous tag. A previous-tag baseline could chain one doors-unchanged assertion from another while the doors drift a small diff at a time; the last-rehearsed anchor makes any accumulated release-path change force a new rehearsal.

The record carries all three measurements as observed at its candidate head, never copied from an earlier record. drills/0.4.1.md and drills/0.5.0.md are the worked examples; the latter's amendment from a predicted empty lib/ diff to the observed lib/ruling.sh delta is why each candidate is measured afresh (#233). Re-running its stricter baseline now is also the path-enumeration proof: git diff 0.4.0 0.5.0 -- <release-path> is only the CEREMONY_SELF_REF pin, while adding lib/ruling.sh makes the diff non-empty even though neither release door reads that file (#217, #237).

actions/drill-recorded refuses any bare-version tree whose record is missing or blank. A waived drill is still a record: the file says WAIVED and why — a maintainer's call, visible and reviewable in the release PR's diff, never a silent skip.

The runner-probe venue

Not a drill. A drill rehearses the release doors on a disposable repo and ends. This is the opposite shape: one standing repo that exists so that runner-only facts can be measured on demand, and it is never archived.

heavy-duty/ceremony-runner-probe — private, standing, reset between probes. Ruled by the operator as option (A) of ceremony#202 (#5631).

Why a standing repo, when drills are disposable

Some facts are only true inside Actions, under the token Actions injects, and no local harness or PAT can reproduce them. The worked example is ceremony#192:

DELETE /issues/{n}/labels/{id}   ->  500   under ${{ github.token }} in a workflow
DELETE /issues/{n}/labels/{id}   ->  204   under a maintainer PAT, same call

A probe that runs anywhere else passes and proves nothing. Before this venue existed the answer was "un-archive a drill repo", which was requested three times in two days across two issues and never became anything — the three drill repos (ceremony-drill-0.4.1, -0.4.1-final, -191) are all archived, and each was minted for one probe and then wanted again.

The disposal rule above does NOT apply here

The rehearsal section says the builder archives the scratch repo and the operator deletes it. That rule is for drills. Archiving this repo defeats its entire purpose, and it is the failure mode the three archived drill repos demonstrate — each was archived correctly, by the rule, and each then had to be un-archived or replaced.

So: never archive it, never delete it, and if you find it archived, un-archive it rather than minting a fourth one.

Standing it up is the operator's step

Bot identities cannot create repositories in heavy-duty. Measured 2026-08-05 with a fleet identity holding the repo scope:

POST /api/v1/orgs/heavy-duty/repos   ->  403  "not allowed to create repository in organization"
POST /api/v1/user/repos              ->  201  (personal namespace only)

This is the same shape as the drill delete: a deliberate permission boundary, not a misconfiguration, and the same rule applies — do not retry it, and do not work around it by putting the venue in a personal namespace, where the org's runner and secrets do not reach. Ask the operator.

Running a probe

1. Reset the repo to a clean state — the probe's own fixtures only, no leftovers from the last one. A probe that inherits state is a probe whose result you cannot attribute.
2. Install whatever the probe needs: a workflow that exercises the call, and docs/CONSUMERS.md's caller stubs if the probe is about the reconcilers.
3. Run it as an Actions job under ${{ github.token }}. This is the whole point of the venue and the one step that cannot be shortcut. A curl from a laptop with a PAT answers a different question — see the 204/500 split above — and a probe run that way is worse than no probe, because it produces a confident wrong answer.
4. Write the results into the forge — an issue or a comment in this repo — rather than leaving them in a job log. Logs age out; ceremony#192's run 701 survived because the job wrote its findings into an issue it created.
5. Record the run number and the repo in whatever issue the probe serves.

What must never happen here

No probe touches heavy-duty/ceremony's board. No labels, no comments, no runs attributable to a probe. The venue exists so that the live board does not have to be the test fixture.

The probes this venue owes

• ceremony#192 — that the repaired sweep actually lifts a label under the workflow token, which is the half its acceptance criteria cannot get from the hermetic contract tests.
• ceremony#205 — whether POST /actions/workflows/{file}/dispatches works on this instance with a valid ref and inputs. Measured so far: GET /actions/workflows 404s and the dispatch route answers 500 rather than a 4xx, which is not enough to port against.
• A 0.6.0 consumer exercise once ceremony#198 has merged.