Two questions were sharing one answer.
"Have the findings changed?" gates COMMENTS. They notify, and a daily "still
broken, same as yesterday" is what teaches everyone to ignore the one that
finally matters.
"Is the body still true?" gates the BODY. Editing an issue body notifies nobody
on either forge, so keeping it honest is free.
Conflated, an unchanged fingerprint froze the body -- and the fingerprint ignores,
by design, everything that moves on its own: healthy rows, the hardware-verified
column, point releases, and how a row is LABELLED. So the master -> 27-dev relabel
would have shipped to the README and never to the issue anybody actually opens.
The report would have gone on saying "master (unreleased) BROKEN" -- the precise
false alarm the relabel exists to kill -- until iX happened to break something
else.
The body is now rewritten whenever it is stale; comments stay strictly a changelog
of real changes. Bodies are compared after normalising line endings, because a
forge that round-trips \r\n would otherwise trigger a silent rewrite every run and
leave the issue looking freshly touched every morning.
`find_issue()` skipped pull requests by testing for the PRESENCE of the
`pull_request` key. GitHub omits that key on a plain issue. Gitea sends it as
`null`. So on Gitea every issue was thrown away as if it were a PR, the lookup
came back empty on every run, and the bot took the "nothing filed yet" branch and
opened a brand-new report instead of editing the one already open.
Nine of them piled up on the canonical forge. Four were filed AFTER the commit
that was supposed to stop exactly this -- the same failure it was written to
prevent, moved from comments to issues. It survived because `find_issue` was the
one function here with no test; the mirror deduped correctly, and the mirror is
what anybody would have looked at.
Test the value, not the key: it is the only form that is true on both forges.
Pinned by tests that carry each forge's payload shape by hand.
Also send both paging parameters. GitHub reads `per_page`, Gitea reads `limit`,
and each ignores the other's; Gitea's default page is 30, so the lookup would
have begun missing the report once the pile it was creating outgrew one page.
It commented on every run that found a break. In one day it left ELEVEN identical
3,000-character comments on the same issue. That is not a warning system, it is a mute
button with extra steps -- and the next real finding would have been scrolled past,
which defeats the entire reason for building it.
Now: the issue BODY is the current truth, edited in place. COMMENTS are a changelog of
changes. A fingerprint of the findings (broken ref/module/problem triples only) is
embedded in the body; a run whose findings match it says nothing at all. It closes the
issue when everything is fixed.
The fingerprint deliberately ignores anything that moves on its own -- healthy rows,
the hardware-verified column, TrueNAS point releases -- so TS-25.10.4 becoming
TS-25.10.5 is not news and does not wake anybody up.
Also:
- The two near-identical per-forge shell steps are gone, replaced by one tested
implementation (tools/compat_publish.py). Two copies of 'find the issue, decide
whether to comment' is two chances to drift, and the Gitea one duplicated an issue
for real.
- The README matrix refresh now opens a PULL REQUEST instead of pushing straight to
main from CI. An unattended push to main is exactly what the release barrier exists
to prevent: a bot that can move main can move it somewhere nobody looked.