A release that published nothing is not news, and at a 5-minute cadence those
messages would bury the ones that matter — the log and bin/repo timers still
show the run happened.
Removing it would have left a start report with no follow-up, so the start
report now carries its own answer: check-versions writes the package names it
queued into the state file instead of touching an empty one, and the release
run reads them. 'A build is running' becomes 'your package is in this build',
which is the question the reports exist to answer.
A push reaching the mirror should take minutes, not up to six hours. All four
units now fire every 5 minutes, staggered a minute apart. Three guards make
that cadence safe:
- Scheduled runs take the release lock NON-BLOCKING (try_release_lock) and
skip the tick when a build is running. Blocking would stack one stalled
process per tick behind a long build and stampede when it finished. Manual
commands still wait, as an operator expects.
- check-versions takes the lock too, and now owns its git pull (--pull, passed
by the unit) instead of an ExecStartPre: at this cadence an unlocked pull
would swap PKGBUILDs out from under a running build.
- A failed release records .build-failed-<channel> and backs off
exponentially (10m, 20m, 40m … capped at 6h) rather than rebuilding the same
broken tree every 5 minutes. Any new commit clears the backoff, since a push
is the most likely fix.
Idle ticks exit without output so the journal keeps showing the runs that
matter, and bin/repo timers reports backoff state — a paused channel is
otherwise indistinguishable from an idle one.
- helpers/paths.sh: validate_mirror/require_valid_mirror for the edge|rc|stable
set, and REPO_ROOT (OMARCHY_REPO_ROOT override) so a secondary checkout like
the rc branch worktree publishes into the same channel tree as the primary
- validate --mirror everywhere it previously accepted any string (sync-repo,
promote-build, update-repo, clean-repo, remove-package) and widen the
edge|stable checks in build, deploy, push-build, auto-release
- build/Dockerfile: rc builds compile against rc-mirror.omarchy.org
Ryan Hughes