A mislabelled build can no longer outrank a newer one, anywhere

A platform build carries two things: a version label a person maintains by hand, and the build number of the delivery run that published it. Only the second one is produced by the machine, and only the second one always increases.

On 2026-09-05 the label was briefly wrong — ten builds went out labelled 3.1.0 on a line that was still 3.0.0, and were withdrawn. Ranked by the label those ten outrank every later build for good, so on 2026-09-07 two portals updated themselves onto one of them, three days behind, and then reported "nothing newer" on every check for the rest of the day. Nothing is ever newer than the highest label. Removing the bad labels did not help either: the ranking simply moved to the next oddly-labelled build, an older one from a retired naming scheme.

The self-updater was taught to rank by the build number instead. What this change adds is the rest of the story: three more places ranked platform builds by their label, and they read the same labels one layer down — the marker files the delivery pipeline writes beside the precompiled content bundles, one per publication, each named after the version that publication carried.

• Which platform line a set of precompiled bundles belongs to.
• Which set of bundles an installation adopts when it has been rolled onto a newer platform than the one those bundles were built for.
• Which sets the clean-up pass keeps, and which it deletes. This is the one that mattered most: ranked by the label, the withdrawn build's bundles were the ones protected, and the newest ones — the sets the running portal actually uses — were the ones removed.

All four now share a single ranking: a build the delivery pipeline published wins on its build number, whatever line it is labelled with; a shipped release, which has no build number of its own because it is a re-tag of a build that does, is ranked among the other releases by version. Nothing in this ranking can be moved by editing a label.

Nothing changes for an installation on a correctly labelled line, which is every installation today — the ranking is identical when the labels agree with the build numbers. It changes what happens the next time they do not.

See Self-Update Target Selection for the incident, the ranking and the one question it deliberately does not answer.