CI set BUILD_VERSION to the CHANNEL — literally "dev", "main", or the tag —
so a running instance answered "which build are you?" with the name of a
branch: {"version":"main"}. The cost was concrete rather than theoretical.
During #3244's live acceptance a deploy was behaving as though it held older
code, and the one endpoint whose job is to settle that could not.
Rule 149's three values, now three fields:
version the NAME, YYYY.MM.DD.HHMM from COMMIT time — "is this the same
code?", so two lanes carrying one commit report one string
build the ORDERING KEY, minutes since 2020-01-01 from BUILD time —
"may this be installed over that?", and the only value anything
may compare
channel its own field. Never a suffix, never a segment of the name
Plus `commit`, so the artifact's claim about itself can be checked against
the :<sha> it was published under (rule 145) — which is exactly the question
that could not be answered tonight.
THE TWO CLOCKS ARE DELIBERATE and look like an inconsistency. The name comes
from the commit so two lanes building one source agree; the key comes from
the build so it cannot go backwards when an older commit is rebuilt. A test
pins both derivations against being "tidied" into one.
ABSENT RATHER THAN EMPTY when unknown. A local build has no ordering key and
no channel; emitting "" or a placeholder would let it claim a position in an
update order it is not part of. A malformed key is dropped rather than passed
through — a reader that cannot order is correct, one that orders on garbage
is not. The key is an int, because a string ordering key is how a comparison
silently becomes lexicographic ("9" > "10").
The payload builder is extracted from the route so it can be tested as a
dict rather than through app startup and a request context.
Tests pin the SHAPE the lanes emit, not the values, including the midnight
leading-zero case rule 149 names specifically — and assert CI never stamps a
branch name as the version again.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5
69ce7afc45