Release history stops being erased on every import

Every time a live-compiled area of the platform builds successfully, it writes down a small record of that build: when it happened, what went into it, and the notes its author wrote. Those records are the release history you see on the area's page.

For the parts of the platform that ship with the product — the documentation, and the built-in catalogs — that history was being wiped. Only the newest record ever survived; the moment the shipped content was refreshed, everything older vanished. Areas outside those built-in sections kept their full history, so the difference was easy to miss unless you happened to look at both.

The cause was a disagreement about what "missing" means. Refreshing shipped content works by comparing what is in the product against what is in the platform, and removing anything the product no longer carries — that is what keeps a deleted page from lingering forever. A release record can never be in the product, though: it does not exist until the platform compiles the area, minutes or days after the product was built. So every record looked like something that had been deleted, and was duly removed.

A related version of this was fixed earlier for content synchronised from a repository, but the fix had to be opted into and the built-in content never did — so it kept deleting its own history, and the failed cleanup attempts showed up as errors nobody could place.

The platform now treats a release record as something it produced rather than something the product supplied, so its absence from the product is no longer read as a deletion. This can only result in fewer things being removed, never more: ordinary content that genuinely disappeared from the product is still cleaned up exactly as before, and a page whose name merely resembles a release is untouched.