Since 4 October 2026 releases are mechanical: the release train cuts the
next minor from main 14 days after the last stable (or earlier on
request), soaks the release candidate on Preview for 24 hours, and
promotes it unchanged unless an open release-blocker issue stops it.
The shipped release docs, the promotion policy, the checklist, the source
of truth, several governance pages and two workflow comments still
described the retired model: release lines, steward judgment, 72-hour
soaks, a nightly rehearsal and patch releases scheduled by severity.
State the train's rules once, in the Release Train section of the
promotion policy, checked against the train itself, and point the rest
at it. Remove the unused internal copy of the promotion resolver, which
still enforced the old 72-hour soak.
The resolver refused a stable promotion until its candidate had soaked for
72 hours, or 168 for a minor. Few installs run previews: 35 of about 7,900
active installs ran v6.4.5-rc.3 in the week to 2026-09-28, so a longer
soak saw little the first day did not, while 75 percent of installs sat on
a stable build a month old. Richard set a 24 hour soak for every release
on 2026-09-28.
The minimums drop to 24 hours for minor and patch alike, the error text
reads the constants instead of repeating numbers, and the workflow and
trigger prompts, the promotion policy and the deployment contract say the
same. The content-drift check and the hotfix exception are unchanged.
Every stable cut re-pins CANONICAL_DEFAULT_PULSE_VERSION in
scripts/install-docker.sh from the RC to the stable version, and the
stable install-metadata test requires it. The drift allowlist omitted
that file, so no release candidate could be promoted without
hotfix_exception. The rule arrived on 2026-09-01, after v6.4.1, so no
stable promotion has run under it yet. v6.4.5 would be the first to fail.
The installer is shipped content, so the resolver accepts it only when
its diff against the candidate changes nothing but that pin line. Any
other installer change still counts as drift.
Go _test.go files are never compiled into a shipped artifact. A stable
cut can need test-only corrections, as v6.4.5 needs for the RC-derived
install-metadata contract, so they no longer count as unsoaked content.
Tests cover the allowed shapes, the refused near misses, and the pin
check against a real git diff.
Apply existing candidate content-drift validation to every future stable promotion, including v6.4 patches. Preserve patch and minor soak durations and the explicit hotfix reason path. Extend regression cases to maintenance releases and give historical unit fixtures explicit source paths rather than reading the live checkout.
Change-source: pulse-maintainer
Git tag creation can precede candidate publication, allowing stable promotion before the required observation period. Read the exact published prerelease and fail closed when publication evidence is unavailable. Cover repaired-candidate minor and patch boundaries.
Change-source: pulse-maintainer
Stable promotions built whatever the dispatch branch was at that second.
The resolver checked that HEAD descends from the promoted release
candidate but never that its content matches, so v6.4.0 shipped 64
changed files, including product code, that v6.4.0-rc.12 had not
soaked. Every v6 version was mapped to main, which now moves every few
minutes under the autonomous maintainer, so each fix to a candidate
brought everything landed since and stable was never an exact soaked
commit. Five of six stable minor releases shipped under version-bound
owner exceptions that waived the soak.
From v6.5.0 the release train applies (RELEASE_PROMOTION_POLICY.md,
"Release Train"): a two-week train sized to measured velocity, a
release/v6.N branch per train declared in the control plane so the
workflow refuses a dispatch from anywhere else, a stable promotion that
may differ from its candidate only in release metadata unless
hotfix_exception names active customer harm, and a seven day soak for
minor releases. The 6.4.x line stays on main so the v6.4.3-rc.1
candidate already prepared there is unaffected. The gap is registered
as coverage gap release-train-exact-candidate-promotion.
The weekly release-dry-run schedule failed at 'Resolve rehearsal
metadata' because GitHub does not apply workflow_dispatch input
defaults to schedule events, so rollback_version arrived empty and
resolve_release_promotion.py rejected the run.
Scheduled runs now pass --derive-rollback-latest-stable, which fills
an empty rollback_version with the latest stable tag preceding the
rehearsal version (currently v6.0.4 for 6.0.5-rc.3). Manual dispatches
keep the explicit rollback_version requirement; the stale prefilled
5.1.29 default is removed so operators state the target themselves.
The deployment-installability contract records the scoped scheduled
exception.
- bump release, Docker, and Helm metadata to 6.0.1
- add committed v6.0.1 patch release notes and changelog
- allow stable patch hotfix releases without a fabricated same-version prerelease tag
rcourtman