A repository sync no longer deletes a type your records still use

A record on your portal — a mail, a proposal, a course — is of a type, and the type is what knows how to show it. Types come from repositories, and a repository can retire one: replace it with something better and stop shipping the old one. The intended way to do that is to move the existing records to the replacement first, on every portal, and only then retire the type.

That order is not always what arrives. A portal that had not synced with the repository for a while received the retirement before the records on it had been moved. The sync looked at the type, saw that one record still used it, wrote a warning saying so — and deleted the type in the same step. The record was still there, but nothing could show it: it opened as Unavailable, blank, with no message naming what was missing. And because the portal's own start-up check then saw a type that had "stopped working", it treated that as damage the new version had caused and refused to finish the update — for a type that no longer existed, which nothing could ever repair.

Now the sync keeps the type for as long as any record still uses it. The type stays, the record keeps opening, and the sync activity says exactly what it is waiting for:

⏸ Held Crm/Mail — the repository no longer carries this NodeType, but the mesh still has 1 instance(s) of it (PartnerRe/Esl/DueDiligenceMail). Not pruned: retype or delete the instances and the next sync completes the retirement.

The same note appears on the repository's settings tab, so you can see at a glance that your portal holds content the repository does not. Move the record to the replacement type, or delete it, and the next sync finishes the retirement on its own — nothing to trigger, nothing to remember. A type that no record uses is retired at once, as before.

The start-up check has learnt the difference too. A type its repository has retired — held for its last records, or already gone — is listed in the portal's health page as retired by its repository, not counted as a failure of the new version, and does not hold an update back.

Two things did not change: a type nobody uses is still removed when its repository drops it, and a genuine compile failure on a type that still exists still stops a bad update from going live.

See Retiring a NodeType for the retirement procedure and Dangling NodeTypes for the mechanism.