Publishing was three steps done by hand, and only two of them left a trace.
The manifest and the APK could go out with nothing anywhere saying what was in
the build — which is how 0.8 shipped with notes and 0.9 shipped with none.
The gate goes on the manifest rather than on a checklist, because the manifest
is the step that cannot be skipped: it is what the in-app updater reads, so an
APK published without it offers nobody an update. A checklist item is skipped
on exactly the busy evening the notes matter most.
🔴 It matches on the `versionName` read out of the APK, never a number typed
here — the same reason this script already reads the version rather than
accepting one. The two cannot disagree.
The check itself lives in the relay repository (Scripts/covers-android.py),
because that is what serves the /releases page and defines the format. Parsing
the JSON here would leave a second copy of the schema to drift out of step
with the first, and a drifted gate is a gate that passes everything.
⚠️ FN_SKIP_RELEASE_NOTES=1 still publishes, and says so loudly on stderr — a
skipped gate that printed nothing would be a gate nobody remembered turning
off. A missing relay checkout is a refusal, not a pass, and names FN_RELAY_DIR.
Proven on a real APK in all four states: covered (manifest written, valid
JSON), uncovered (refused, and stdout stays EMPTY so no half-written manifest
lands), skipped, and no checkout. Every message goes to stderr, because this
script's stdout is the manifest itself.
Paul Hitt