A rebuilt repository syncs again

Content that lives in a git repository reaches your installation when that repository's build goes green — never on the merge itself, and never on a timer. The build is the evidence: it is the only thing that knows whether what was merged is actually installable, so the space waits for it.

That works exactly as intended when the build was started by a commit. It did not work when the build was started by anything else — and increasingly, builds are.

A platform release asks every content repository to rebuild itself against the new platform, to confirm it still works. Nightly runs do the same. Someone re-running a build by hand does the same. In all three cases the repository builds the same branch, the same files, and reports the same green verdict — there is simply no new commit behind it. The chain that listens for green builds was looking for a commit, found none, and quietly dropped the result.

Quietly is the problem. Nothing failed: the connection was live, every delivery was accepted, every build was green, and every dashboard agreed. The only visible symptom was content that had stopped arriving. One space stayed 38 hours behind a change that had been merged and verified, and it would have stayed there indefinitely — there is no background poll behind this to eventually notice, because a poll would import content no build had vetted.

A green build of a repository's main branch now counts as a publish signal however it was started — a commit, a platform release, a schedule, or a person pressing the button. The two things that must be true are unchanged, and one of them is now stated rather than implied:

• the build must be of the main branch's own content — a pull-request build is unmerged code and is still refused, as is anything that merely reports green without building the branch (a code-review bot, for instance);
• and it must have passed.

Anything not on that list is refused rather than admitted, so a new kind of build event cannot start publishing by accident.

Re-verifying a repository that has not changed stays silent: a space already holding the built version is skipped, so a nightly rebuild of an untouched branch does nothing at all — exactly as before.