A repository update now reaches every space, not most of them

Spaces that follow a repository refresh themselves whenever that repository builds successfully. Most of them did. Some never did — and the ones that never did were always the same ones.

The refresh starts by asking a simple question: which spaces follow this repository? That question was being answered the way a search box answers — with a first page of results, the most recently changed ones, capped at fifty. For a search that is exactly right. For "go through all of them" it is quietly wrong, and nothing in the answer says it was only a page.

What made it stick was the ordering. Refreshing a space marks it as recently changed, so every space that did refresh moved to the front of the queue, and the ones that missed out drifted further towards the back. A space that fell off the end could never get back on: it simply stopped following the repository, while every build reported success. On one installation nine spaces out of forty-three had been sitting on stale content for up to a week that way — including course material with fixes their readers never saw.

A read that needs everything can now say so, and this one does. The same mistake had already cost us once elsewhere — a build pass that saw fifty source files out of thousands — so the platform now also warns whenever it hands back a capped page to a caller that never asked for one, naming the query, rather than letting it pass for the whole set.

The refresh has also learnt to account for itself. It now reports how many spaces follow the repository, how many it updated, and for each one it passed over, which one and why — "on a different branch", "already on this commit". A space that is being skipped is now something you can read in the log instead of something you have to notice.