rig/CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

History before 0.1.0 lives in git — rig grew its version surface (VERSION, rig --version, the side-by-side versions/<v> install layout; #35/#36) on the way to cutting its first release, and this file starts there.

Unreleased

Fixed

• An unreadable check rollup no longer reads as "nothing is failing" (#90) — when gh pr view failed, the fallback left the statusCheckRollup key absent entirely, and (.statusCheckRollup // []) collapsed that into the same NONE as a PR that genuinely has no checks. NONE blocks nothing, so a transient API failure presented the PR as mergeable by a human: an unknown certified as green, which is the exact shape of the bug #87 was opened to stop, surviving in the one place that fix never looked.

  checks_state now separates the two — UNREADABLE for an absent key (a read that failed), NONE for a present-but-empty array (a PR that really has no checks) — and the sweep leaves an UNREADABLE PR exactly as it found it rather than recomputing labels from facts it did not read. Deliberately not a blocker: blocking would flap the whole board on one bad API call, and the next tick is fifteen minutes away. Caught by the author after opening the PR, not by review.

• CI runs test/labels-reconcile.sh, which it had never run (#90) — the file arrived with #87 and ci.yml was not extended to call it, so the label state machine that gates every PR in this repo went covered only by whoever remembered to run its fixtures by hand. #88 merged reporting 51 passing fixtures: true on the author's machine, never once verified here. Box and cast both ran the suite already; only rig did not, so this closes a rig-local gap rather than a family-wide one. It was found by asking, while adding fixtures to the suite, where the suite actually ran.

• state:needs-human no longer appears on PRs a human cannot merge (#87, 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.

  This repo paid for it directly. During the ten-PR batch merged on 2026-07-20, every merge re-conflicted the PRs below it through CHANGELOG.md — and each one kept its state:needs-human label the whole time, inviting a merge that could not happen. It was noticed only by opening them one at a time, which is the exact work the label exists to save.

  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, so box#137's own tip carried a CANCELLED scope beside the SUCCESS scope that superseded it, and judging every entry would have stranded every re-run PR in needs-rebase.

  Which entry is newest is dated by when the run began — startedAt, falling back only if it never recorded one — discarding both spellings of absent. A run still in flight has no completion, but gh does not omit the field: its Go struct marshals the zero time as the string 0001-01-01T00:00:00Z, and // falls through null and false only. Dating by completion therefore sorted the live re-run to the bottom and let last pick the very run it superseded — a green context with a replacement mid-flight read SUCCESS, inviting a merge the button had already disabled, which is #136 restored by the fix for it.

  Taking the newest stamp each run carries is not a fix either, and this is the subtle part: it compares a finished predecessor by when it ended against a live successor by when it began, which is not an ordering on runs at all. A run cancelled by the concurrency group does not stop the instant its replacement starts — the runner has to receive the signal and wind down — so the predecessor completing after the successor started is the ordinary case, 13s wide on the box#137 tip that motivated the supersede rule. For that whole drain window the dying predecessor out-dated its own replacement. One consistent quantity, start time, is the only ordering that holds. An entry carrying no usable timestamp at all sorts last rather than first, so something that cannot be dated is never discarded in favour of a stale success. Every ambiguity here resolves toward "not settled".

  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, because a correct needs-human still does not say which PR to merge first, and order matters when they conflict. Queue order is intent, so the reconciler never sets it — it only clears it once the PR stops being mergeable-by-a-human, which is precisely the staleness that made needs-human untrustworthy. Both live shapes, the mixed round, the whole check-outcome enum, and the re-run in every temporal arrangement it occurs in — superseded, still in flight in both spellings of an absent completion, undateable, and still draining past its replacement's start — are pinned in test/labels-reconcile.sh. Ported from heavy-duty/box#137 so the three repos' reconcilers stay byte-identical; fixtures 19 → 51.

Added

• rig platform — what is this machine, calculated at run time, stored nowhere (#64) — rig read no hardware at all; the single exception was uname -m in runner-install.sh, used to pick a tarball and then discarded. So "is this the 32GB one, or the M900?" was answered by logging in and running free -h, nproc, df -h and uname -r by hand, four commands deep, on a machine you were already unsure about. rig platform prints hostname, OS, kernel, CPU, memory, disk and virtualization, then a provenance block (which rig, when, and the role marker's traits). It computes rather than stores: specs change without rig doing anything — RAM added, root disk resized, the unattended-upgrades bootstrap itself enables patching the kernel — so a stored spec is stale the moment the machine changes, and refreshing one per run would collide with bootstrap's "a second run changes nothing" contract. Nothing is written, so nothing can go stale. The corollary is deliberate: reading only /proc, uname, /etc/os-release, df and systemd-detect-virt means it needs no root, makes no network call, and runs on a pristine Debian box rig has never bootstrapped — useful for deciding what to converge a machine into, not only for auditing it afterwards. That also makes it the rare rig command the harness can RUN for real instead of grepping: the tests assert the actual answer describes the actual test machine. Provenance is read, never written, and degrades per-file — /etc/rig/manifest is #61 and does not exist yet, so those lines read not bootstrapped on every machine today and nothing else depends on it. The reader is keyed to #61's documented schema (schema, bootstrapped_by/_at, converged_by/_at) and fixtures pin that exact spelling, so the integration cannot land silently broken; birth and latest stay separate rather than one being inferred from the other. A fresh machine writes both pairs equal, so two identical lines read as "never re-converged"; a manifest missing the pair is partial rather than fresh, and says so instead of backfilling from birth. Named platform and not status on purpose: users status and runner status cross-check recorded against live state and print DRIFT, and a command that records nothing cannot drift — which also leaves rig status free for the machine-wide roll-up. Known limitation, stated rather than guessed at: CPU/MEMORY are read from /proc with no cgroup awareness, and whether an lxc guest sees its own limits or the host's totals depends on whether lxcfs is in play — it is unverified, so those two lines are unreliable there.

• /etc/rig/manifest records which rig converged a machine, and when (#61) — the entire durable output of a bootstrap run was one line in /etc/rig/role, and that line is about what the box is, never about what built it. VERSION was read in exactly one place (bin/rig:9, for --version) and that reports the currently installed tree, not the one that ran; there was no timestamp anywhere in the codebase. SSH into a control plane six months on and a machine converged by 0.1.0-dev was indistinguishable from one converged by 0.4.0. Bootstrap — both the machine roles and the box tenant roles — now stamps a second file beside the marker: schema=1, bootstrapped_by/bootstrapped_at (the rig that first converged this machine, pinned forever) and converged_by/converged_at (the newest rig to have converged it), read back with a new rig manifest [<key>]. key=value, one per line, 0644 — never JSON or YAML, because this is the one file that must stay readable on the most broken machine in the fleet and a rig-bootstrapped box has no YAML parser and no jq.

  Only decided facts go in, which is what keeps bootstrap.sh:3's contract ("a second run changes nothing", enforced by cmp-guards at nine sites) intact: bootstrapped_* is first-write-wins, and converged_* updates only when the version actually differs — it is the time the converging version last changed, not the time of the last run. A naive timestamp would have made every re-run a diff and had rig report a change it did not make. Observed facts — cores, RAM, disk, kernel — are deliberately absent: they go stale without rig doing anything, so they belong to rig platform (#64), which computes them fresh and stores nothing. /etc/rig/role is untouched — the marker holds traits and has six readers; the manifest holds provenance. Readers must ignore keys they do not know, and the writer preserves lines it does not own, so a manifest written by a newer rig stays readable to (and survives a rewrite by) an older one.

Changed

• PR labels split into two axes: state:* (whose ball) and blocker:* (what is in the way) (heavy-duty/box#137) — state:needs-rebase, added here only days ago by #87, is retired in the same breath. In its place: blocker:conflict, blocker:ci-red and blocker:unrequested, applied additively. A single rule joins the axes — state:needs-human requires zero blockers — which is the invariant #87 was reaching for, stated once instead of defended at every branch of a precedence chain.

  The single-label design projected independent facts onto one totally-ordered value. Mergeability, check status and the review round move on their own clocks; a PR can be conflicted and red and stalled at the same instant. A total order has to pick one of those to say, so the rest vanish. Every precedence bug this machine has had lived on that ordering, #87's included: the fix there was to reorder the chain and collect the round before deciding, which bought correctness for one more configuration without removing the reason the next one would break. state:needs-rebase was the design's clearest tell — a single label fired by both a conflict and a failing check, two problems needing opposite work, telling an agent to rebase when what it owed was a bug fix. Box's board has the case in the open: #120 was conflicted and red, and could only ever say one of them.

  Blockers are a set. There is no precedence between them to get wrong, and adding a fourth one later cannot reshuffle the meaning of the other three. What stays on the ordered axis is purely the review round, which is the one place here where an ordering is genuinely meaningful — a round really does have a sequence.

  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 as "waiting on the reviewers" until the stale sweep caught up; it now reads state:addressing + blocker:unrequested, because the agent owes the ask and the board should say so. blocker:unrequested covers both shapes of "this head has no verdict from somebody": nobody reviewed it, or everybody reviewed an older tree and the approvals staled behind a push. The second is the worse of the two, since it leaves approvals on the page that no longer describe the code. Drafts stay exempt — the bots ignore drafts by design — as does an explicit human request, since a maintainer claiming a PR early is deliberate.

  The reconciler strips state:needs-rebase on sight via a RETIRED list, so the retirement heals the existing board instead of stranding a label that nothing recomputes. It also filters every label it is about to add against the repo's actual label set, read once per sweep: gh issue edit rejects the whole call on one unknown name, so on a repo that has not yet bootstrapped the new blocker:* labels a single missing one would have taken the state convergence down with it — on exactly the PRs this change exists to heal. Now the state still converges and the missing labels are named in the log. Fixtures 51 → 72.

• BREAKING: --class human|server is now --root-door closed|open (#77) — the trait was named for who lives on a box; what it decides is one thing, and it is not occupancy: whether root SSH stays open as the control plane's automation door, or rig users close-root shuts it once named operators can get in. The roles had been saying so for a while. dev-server is an unattended VM-host appliance — nobody lives there, operators visit it to mint boxes and leave — and by occupancy it is plainly a server. It was class=human anyway, and correctly so, because operators enter it as themselves and its root door must close. The trait was right; its name described the wrong axis.

  That stayed cheap until a second thing wanted the word "server". After #76 the -server suffix names the machine family, so dev-server carried a suffix saying server and a trait saying human, and nothing in the name told a reader that the two words were answering unrelated questions. dev-server --root-door closed says exactly what is true, and -server means one thing everywhere. The values moved with the name: human → closed, server → open, and the marker field follows as root-door=.

  Other names were considered. --root-door open|closed describes a destination rather than the state at bootstrap time — bootstrap leaves root SSH open on every box, and the door only shuts later, when close-root runs — so --root-door closes|stays was on the table for naming the fate as a verb, as was --automation-door yes|no for naming the thing itself. Both were rejected in favour of the plainer pair: the marker is already a declaration of intent rather than a report of observed state everywhere else in this repo (host=yes claims a box hosts VMs; #58 settled that the marker's claim wins over probing the machine), so a trait that states the door's designed end state is consistent with how every other field is read. Every string that prints the trait says "once operators exist" or names close-root explicitly, so the tense never has to be inferred.

  Old markers still resolve, permanently, and that is the substance of this change. Unlike #76's role rename — role names are informational, nothing reads them back — this field is written into /etc/rig/role and read from there on live machines, where it gates rig users close-root. Every box bootstrapped before this carries class=human or class=server and carries it until someone re-bootstraps it, which for a fleet is never. Dropping the old read would have broken in both directions at once and both are incidents: a machine whose door is supposed to close loses the ability to close it, and — through bootstrap-tenant's machine-marker guard, which used the presence of class= as its "is this a real fleet machine?" test — a live box stops looking like a machine at all, so a tenant converge sails past the refusal that exists to protect it and clobbers its marker. That second one is the fail-open direction and was the least obvious part of the change.

  So one resolver, root_door_of, reads both vocabularies, and every consumer goes through it — close-root's gate, apply's root-SSH note, and the tenant guard — because a compat read that lives at three call sites is three chances to drift. root-door= wins where both fields are present and agree; class= answers alone on every pre-#77 marker. A marker carrying both and disagreeing resolves to a refusal rather than a winner: bootstrap writes one line fresh and never produces that state, so a marker in it was hand-edited, and rig declines to arbitrate between two equally-authored claims about a root door. A marker naming neither refuses too, unchanged from before. Both refusals fail closed, which here means the door stays open and the operator is told to re-run bootstrap — never a door welded shut on a machine whose only entrance it was.

  The resolver matches whole fields, not substrings — the marker is one line of space-separated key=value pairs, so it pads both ends and matches on field boundaries. Review caught the first cut doing unanchored matching, which resolved any value that extended a real one: root-door=closedish read as closed and passed close-root's gate — the single arm that authorizes an irreversible act — and class=humanoid did the same through the compat arm, both contradicting the resolver's own promise that a value outside the set resolves empty and fails closed. Only reachable by hand- editing a marker, so never a live incident, but this is the one function every consumer trusts and it owes them exactness rather than nearly. Both vocabularies are anchored: fixing only the current spelling would have left every pre-#77 box carrying the hole. Whitespace is normalised first, so a hand-edit using tabs reads the same rather than trading one silent misread for another.

  New markers are written in the new vocabulary only. Writing both would keep an old rig reading a new marker, but it would entrench the retired spelling on every box rig ever converges and make the disagreement case reachable from rig's own hand instead of only from a text editor. The compat obligation runs the other way and only the other way: new rig reads old markers. The bounded consequence to know about is downgrade — flipping a box back to a pre-#77 rig with rig use leaves that older code unable to recognize the new marker; the flip already WARNS on a bootstrapped host (#35), and re-running bootstrap under whichever rig you settle on rewrites the line.

  The suite proves the compat read rather than asserting it. Fixture markers are kept deliberately at the retired spelling — byte for byte as a real pre-#77 box reads, the same convention #76's pre-rename-cp fixture established — and pinned at both consumers: close-root still passes on class=human and still refuses on class=server, with today's refusal text naming today's flag, and the tenant guard still recognizes a pre-#77 machine marker as a machine. Deleting the compat arm turns ten of them red.

• BREAKING: the box tenant roles carry a -box suffix (#76) — the other half of the rename below. claude → claude-box, codex → codex-box, grok → grok-box, staging → staging-box, so a role name always says which family it belongs to: -server builds a fleet machine, -box converges a guest a box minted.

  The role carries the suffix; nothing inside the guest does. A tenant user is the account the box seed created (BOX_USER) and each agent CLI reads its own dotdir, so claude-box still converges the claude user and still writes ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md. The suffix is rig's word for "this is a guest", not a rename of anything the guest contains — no path, no account, and no CLI binary moved.

  Migration: hard cut, no aliases, same as the machine roles. The old names are refused as unknown tenant roles at both entrypoints — rig bootstrap <name> and the tenant script directly — and the suite asserts each one at both, because an alias left in for a single tenant is exactly the shape that survives review: the taxonomy reads complete while one old name still quietly converges. The practical consequence is cross-repo: a box seed carrying BOX_BOOTSTRAP_ROLE="claude" now fails its own mint-time bootstrap, so heavy-duty/box#125 (closing heavy-duty/box#123) updates the seeds and must land after this.

• BREAKING: machine roles carry a -server suffix, and the VM host gets its name back (#76) — rig builds two kinds of thing that sit on opposite sides of a trust boundary: tailnet machines it converges, and guests a box mints. Both families lived in one flat namespace, and no role name said which one you were asking for. staging is where that stopped being cosmetic — the word names the metal that hosts guests and the guests on it, only one of them could have the name, and #31 gave it to the guests. The VM-host shape was left with no name at all, spelled custom --class server --host yes --join authkey, which is what every refusal in the tree recited at an operator who had confused the two.

  So the suffix names the family: control-plane-server, workload-server, runner-server, dev-server, and the restored staging-server (class=server host=yes join=authkey — the preset #31 retired, back under a name that cannot be mistaken for its own guests). host=yes already installs the box CLI and runs box's setup-host, so staging-server is a table row rather than new machinery, and it stays out of the tag:server allow-list on purpose: a host is never managed by the control plane, its guests are, so mint its key with tag:local.

  custom and workstation keep bare names, and that is the rule rather than an exception to it. custom presets nothing and can be any shape — a guest included — so a family claim is one it cannot make. workstation is somebody's own device rather than fleet infrastructure: it joins by interactive login, comes up user-owned and untagged, and the tailnet never manages it.

  Migration — this is a hard cut, with no aliases. The old names are refused as unknown roles; a box bootstrapped under one is re-bootstrapped rather than migrated, which at this fleet size costs less than four deprecation paths each quietly keeping an old name alive. Two consequences worth knowing before you re-run anything. TS_HOSTNAME defaults to the role name, so a box that took the default now comes up as control-plane-server rather than control-plane — pass --hostname to hold a name steady, and check anything pinning one (ACL entries, a cast environments.yaml server name, host keys). And rig coolify install / rig coolify backup install match the role name in /etc/rig/role, so they now look for role=control-plane-server; a pre-rename control plane takes their warning branch until it is re-bootstrapped. That check has always been advisory and never a gate, so the run still proceeds and the warning names the repair.

  The rename also reaches every string that tells an operator to run a role, not just the code that accepts one — bootstrap-tenant.sh emits the staging guest's tailnet-join next step (sudo rig bootstrap workload-server), and two of its refusals recite the machine-role list. A stale next-step is worse than a stale flag: it fails when someone copy-pastes it, on a different box, minutes after the run that printed it reported success. test/cli.sh sweeps every shipped script for pre-rename role names rather than pinning the known sites, because the next instance of this will be somewhere else.

  dev-server was class=human when this landed, which read like a contradiction and was not: the suffix names the family, the class named the root-SSH door policy, and operators enter a dev box as themselves so close-root shuts its door. The two axes genuinely shared the word "server", which was a wart — #77, above, renames the trait to what it actually controls and retires it. It stayed a separate change because it reaches markers on live machines that guard root SSH, and so needed a compat read this rename did not.

Fixed

• CI's shellcheck sweep now reaches .github/scripts/ (#70) — the step ran shopt -s globstar and globbed bin/* **/*.sh, but globs skip dot-prefixed names without dotglob, so **/ never descended into .github/ and two tracked scripts were linted by nothing: labels-reconcile.sh and release-lib.sh. The second is the one that stings — it holds changelog_section, the extraction release.yml sources to build the published release body and the same function test/release.sh's changelog_armed guard (#66) calls to decide whether main is armed. The script deciding both what ships and whether the changelog is safe was the script CI never read. Adding dotglob pulls in exactly those two files and nothing else; both already pass, so this closes a hole in the net rather than fixing a defect behind it. Paired with a class check that fails the step when any tracked .sh falls outside the globbed set, so the gap cannot reopen quietly — including via a symlinked directory, which globstar declines to traverse.

• Ctrl-D at the rig uninstall confirm no longer aborts in silence (#68) — uninstall_confirm's read -r reply was unguarded. Under set -euo pipefail, and called as a plain statement, EOF made read return non-zero and killed the shell at the read — the case on the next line never ran, so die "aborted." never fired. The operator saw the question, pressed Ctrl-D, and got nothing back: no message, just exit 1, at the exact moment the tool had asked whether to delete their install. It failed closed (nothing was ever removed), but nothing said so. Now read -r reply || reply="", so EOF falls through to the *) arm and aborts out loud — the spelling commands/db.sh already used for the same [y/N] shape, one file away. test/cli.sh gains the first drills of the interactive path, driving y and Ctrl-D through a real pty (util-linux script, skipped where it is absent) and asserting the MESSAGE rather than the exit code, which the bug also produced.

• users apply now tells "revoke everyone" apart from "I truncated the file" (#65) — a users file naming zero users is a valid instruction to revoke every operator on the box, and it is indistinguishable from a file a stray > produced. The per-user warnings apply already emitted arrive after the decision and scale wrong: twenty operators is twenty lines of scrollback, so the signal was loudest exactly where it read as noise. The /etc/rig/users ledger draws the line apply needs — an empty file against an empty ledger is an unambiguous no-op; against a populated one it closes every named door — so only the second case now stops, states how many operators are about to be revoked, and requires explicit consent: --yes, RIG_YES=1 (the installer-family variable rig uninstall already reads), or a y on a TTY. Without a terminal and without consent it exits 2, in uninstall_confirm's words, rather than assume a yes it cannot ask for or hang on a prompt nothing can answer. A confirmation, not rig bootstrap's flat refusal of the same file (#57/#59): bootstrap asserts who lives on a box, apply converges, and converging to zero stays a legitimate de-provisioning. Ledger entries already marked revoked don't count toward the number, so a second identical run stays the silent no-op. Mass revocation below the empty-file bright line (a file dropping 19 of 20) is deliberately still ungated — that needs a threshold someone has to justify, and #65 stays open for it.

0.2.0 — 2026-07-19

Added

• users apply grants the box tier, not just its socket (#49) — role box resolved to exactly one action, usermod -aG incus. That is the socket; it is step 1 of the five box grant performs, so every box-role user still needed an admin to run box grant <user> by hand before their first box new would do anything but refuse ("your project has no box-net profile"), and until that admin arrived they held an incus membership with no converged project — incus-user would lazily hand them a stock unhardened NAT bridge, which is worse than no grant at all. On host=yes apply now calls box grant per box-role user, after useradd (grant refuses an unknown account) and with the group ADD deferred to grant, so a grant that fails partway can take the socket back with it. Failures split the way the host= guard beside them already splits: a missing box CLI on host=yes dies (a broken VM host), a per-user grant failure warns and continues (one box-role user must not stop apply for the fleet). host=no and marker-less boxes keep their existing skip-with-warning. An incus-admin member is warned, not fatal — box grant refuses them today, which heavy-duty/box#99 fixes box-side with no rig change needed.

Changed

• BREAKING: rig bootstrap takes the users file, and requires it (#51) — bootstrap already knew everything else about what a box is (class, host, join, hostname) and wrote /etc/rig/role to say so; the users file was the last piece of that answer it did not take, so bring-up was two commands and the second was the forgettable one. --users <path> now runs the users apply convergence as bootstrap's final phase — after the traits, after the verified tailnet join, after the role marker (apply reads that marker), and after the host=yes box install (so box-role users find the incus group box's own setup-host built). One command, and the box has its people on it. The file is still passed per invocation and never persisted; --users - is refused, because bootstrap's stdin belongs to the pre-auth key prompt.

  Migration: every existing rig bootstrap invocation must add --users <path> or --no-users. Omitting both is now a usage error (exit 2) naming both flags, and passing both is a usage error too. Scripted bring-up that already ran rig users apply as a separate step can either fold it in (--users ./users, and drop the separate call) or keep the old shape verbatim by adding --no-users. Required on class=server as well as class=human: a server nobody logs into routinely is exactly where shared-root access rots, and per-human accounts keep attribution intact for the times someone does go in — so the complete path is the default path, and skipping it is deliberate rather than an omission that looks identical to forgetting. The box TENANT roles (claude|codex|grok| staging) take neither flag: a guest is minted non-interactively by box, never joins the tailnet, and has no SSH door of its own — entry is box shell, gated by the host's incus grants.

  A bad users file is caught up front now (the same parser apply uses, before apt, the hostname change, and any spent pre-auth key), and on host=yes with RIG_SKIP_BOX_INSTALL=1 a box-role user with no incus group refuses immediately instead of a hundred lines later — the one case where the outcome is already certain. rig still never installs Incus and never calls box setup-host on its own account; every other way that step can fail lands in users apply's existing refusal, unchanged.

Fixed

• A release no longer disarms the changelog under the PRs still in flight (#67) — the ceremony stamps ## Unreleased to ## X.Y.Z — YYYY-MM-DD and stops. Every PR authored before that merge wrote its entry under ## Unreleased; with the heading gone, git files the entry under whatever now occupies the position — the release that already shipped. There is no conflict, because the stamped heading and the incoming entry never overlap textually, so the one signal an author relies on ("git told me to look") is absent exactly when the outcome is wrong. It happened here: #60's #58 entry landed inside ## 0.1.0 at 67386b4 and was repaired two minutes later by 0ff520c; #54 would have filed a BREAKING entry the same way. The published release body is never affected — release.yml extracts it from the tree at the tag, before the late merges land — so the only file that drifts is the one only maintainers read, which is why it survived a whole release batch unnoticed. Fixed in both halves the failure has. The ceremony now re-arms: it adds a fresh empty ## Unreleased above the section it just stamped, so a late merge has somewhere correct to land with no author action. That belongs to the ceremony step in CONTRIBUTING.md, not to release.yml — no workflow has ever touched the heading; the stamping was always by hand, and the -dev re-arm the workflow does perform was only ever about VERSION. And test/release.sh now keys its guard to VERSION rather than demanding a literal heading: a stamped top section is legal exactly when VERSION is bare, and the moment it carries -dev — main, where feature PRs merge — the top section must be ## Unreleased. That distinguishes the two states the old check collapsed into one, so it catches a disarmed main without re-breaking the ceremony's own tree the way the pre-#44 guard did. The rule is proven against seven constructed VERSION + CHANGELOG.md pairs, including a re-armed ceremony whose top section is legitimately empty — the state the old non-empty assert would have rejected. box and cast carry the same flow and the same exposure (heavy-duty/box#96); cast is disarmed on main as of this writing and is getting the sibling fix.

• A host=no box with an incus group no longer hands out the bare socket (#58) — users apply consulted the host= trait only when group incus was ABSENT (die on host=yes, skip on host=no). When the group was PRESENT the trait was never asked, so a host=no or marker-less box that nonetheless carried the group — box setup-host ran, then the box was re-bootstrapped with other traits — gave every box-role user a bare usermod -aG incus: the socket with no tier behind it, which incus-user answers by lazily building an UNHARDENED project under whoever opens it (incusbr-<uid>, NAT on v4 and v6, no ACL, no dns.mode=none, no port isolation). The marker now decides in BOTH directions, through one new pure gate (assert_marker_hosts_vms, testable against fixture markers non-root like assert_marker_human): the box role applies only where the box CLAIMS to host VMs, so the verdict is identical whether or not the group exists. The machine deliberately does not overrule the marker — but the skip is not silent either: when the group exists and the trait disagrees, the warning names the contradiction and rig bootstrap as the repair. On such a box exact-membership convergence now strips box-role users out of incus, on the same reasoning: a membership inherited from a previous life is the same half-grant as a freshly added one.

• Dropping the box role revokes through box, not behind its back (#50) — users apply converged group incus with a bare gpasswd -d, the same move it makes for rig-admin and rig. Those two are rig's; incus is box's, and box revoke does strictly more with it: it says out loud that supplementary groups are read at LOGIN, so a session the dropped operator already holds keeps the Incus socket until it dies, and hands over loginctl terminate-user <user> as the remedy. rig logged removed <user> from incus and moved on, so an operator who dropped someone from the users file and watched apply succeed believed the VM access was gone — and was wrong for as long as that user held a session. Both removal paths (the per-user convergence and the dropped-user sweep) now call box revoke, which keeps one owner for the group. Never --purge: that deletes the user's boxes, images and project, and destroying someone's running machines is not a convergence step — it stays an explicit admin act. The exit code is not trusted (#12's lesson): a revoke that returns 0 with the membership still standing has not closed the socket, and rig falls back to removing the group itself, as it also does where box is not installed. Every fallback path carries the session warning, because the silence was the bug.

• rig bootstrap refuses a users file that names no users (#57) — an empty, comments-only or whitespace-only file is not a parse error, so it passed pre-flight, converged nothing, and left the box root-only: the exact outcome --no-users exists to make explicit, reached by the flag added to guarantee the opposite. Bootstrap's pre-flight now catches the zero-user parse — before apt, the hostname change, or a spent pre-auth key — and refuses, naming --no-users as the way to ask for a root-only box out loud. Scoped to rig bootstrap's contract only: a standalone rig users apply against an emptied file is a real de-provisioning operation and is unchanged.

0.1.0 — 2026-07-19

Fixed

• The release suite accepts the ceremony's own tree (#44) — test/release.sh demanded a literal ## Unreleased heading in the real CHANGELOG.md, extracting non-empty and containing #32. All three are 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 both fork rehearsals, which tag a branch (release.yml runs; ci.yml never does). The guard now asserts what it was for: whatever the TOP ## section is — Unreleased between releases, the stamped version on and right after one — the exact changelog_section the workflow runs extracts it non-empty. The rotting issue-number grep is gone.

• The installer survives an environment with no $HOME (#39) — cloud-init's runcmd runs install.sh with no $HOME set, and under set -u the first expansion died with a bash unbound-variable stack instead of an install — found live by box#88's template seed, which pins HOME=/root as its own scar. The installer now derives the home from getent for the effective user (root included) before any path is built from $HOME, and when getent has no answer either it refuses by name. Driven with a shim getent both ways: the derived-home install lands, the no-answer refusal is pinned. (#41 — merged without its entry; restored here at the release gate.)

• Headless credential prompts refuse loudly instead of dying silently (#42) — the interactive credential prompts (TS_AUTHKEY in bootstrap, RUNNER_TOKEN in runner install, RUNNER_REMOVE_TOKEN in runner remove, and both tokens in runner repoint — a site the new no-bare-read test caught after the issue counted three) were bare read -rsp: with stdin not a tty (CI, box exec, any script), read fails, set -e ends the run, and the log just stops — exit 1, no last word, measured live in the 2026-07-19 release drill. Each prompt now checks for a tty first and dies naming the variable that unblocks an unattended run (runner remove also names --local), and every read is || die-guarded so EOF at a real prompt gets the same courtesy. db.sh already held the line here; now all of rig does.

Added

• Merging a release-labeled PR IS the release — and the release re-arms main itself (#47) — the rig twin of heavy-duty/box#96, born of the ceremony retro: the tag was a separate, manual, silent-when-forgotten step, and a forgotten tag produces no red X. release.yml now fires on pushes to main (fork-sourced ceremony PRs get a read-only token on pull_request events), reading the transition from the push itself: event.before to the pushed head. A decide step answers four states — release-flow work merged under the release label (-dev endstates, 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). Then, in the same job, it API-creates the tag at the merge commit, publishes with the extracted notes — 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. A GITHUB_TOKEN-created tag never fires the tag-push trigger, so the paths cannot double-publish — and that tag-push path survives intact as the documented manual fallback and backfill.

• Tagged releases, and an installer that installs them (#32) — the rig half of the flow designed in heavy-duty/box#83, near-verbatim. A release is a PR, then a tag: the release: X.Y.Z PR bumps VERSION 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 == VERSION (mismatch fails loudly and creates nothing) — with that version's section of this file as the body, extracted by the same changelog_section the test harness drives. No assets: for a pure-bash tree, GitHub's source tarball for the tag IS the package. 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 archive/refs/tags/<tag>.tar.gz. RIG_REF picks the other two channels: a tag pins (refs/tags outranks a same-named branch), a branch (RIG_REF=main) tracks the development tree. Until 0.1.0 is cut the default channel has nothing to resolve and dies saying exactly that, naming RIG_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". Step 5 of #32 — pinning BOX_REF in the host-installs-box path — stays open until box cuts its next tagged release.