The first merge to `main` took the Android lane down (run 4857): the decide
job exited 1 in 0.16 seconds with no output at all, and the image build
skipped behind it because a failing lane must not publish.
`stable` had never published an APK, which the guard treats as a pass — there
is nothing to go backwards from, and `[ -z "$published" ]` says so in a branch
of its own. That branch was unreachable. `published="$(published_for ...)"`
under `set -e` dies on the substitution before it, and everything the pipeline
would have printed goes into the capture rather than the log.
What decided which lookups had the bug is the last command in the pipeline.
`sed` on empty input exits 0; `grep` exits 1. Three of the four end in `sed`.
Android's version_code ends in `grep -oE '[0-9]+$'`, so it was the only one —
and only on a channel with nothing on it, which is why a week of dev pushes
never saw it.
The tests now reach the half of the guard that talks to a feed, with `curl`
shadowed on PATH so they stay hermetic: an empty channel passes and builds, a
lower published version passes, a higher one fails the lane, and an equal
Android code is refused because Android will not install it.