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All release/publishing workflows must be deterministic, serialized safely, and strictly gated so that user-facing artifacts are published only after the release candidate has passed the final checks.

Apply this standard when building CI/CD for npm/GitHub releases, backfills, and container/image promotions:

• Serialize release operations across tags and backfills using a single repository-wide concurrency group with GitHub’s durable queue behavior (so later bumps can’t cancel/replace earlier pending work).
• Validate publish eligibility from event inputs:
  • For tag-triggered publishing, require the exact tag ref (e.g., refs/tags/...) and a correct ref type.
  • Require ancestry onto the protected branch (e.g., commit must be on main).
• Use a deterministic toolchain in the workflow:
  • Explicitly install the exact required tool version into an isolated temporary prefix.
  • Verify the installed version before continuing.
• Promote only after verification succeeds:
  • Build a release candidate, run verification/attestation checks against that candidate, then publish tags/manifests.
  • Prefer selecting/constructing immutable references by digest first, then attest and run all downstream checks, and only then update :latest / version tags.
• Preserve human-authored overrides in automation:
  • If a user manually applied an exclusion label (e.g., skip-release-notes), automation must not delete it on subsequent title edits.

Example (pattern for safe promotion ordering):

concurrency:
  group: release-${{ github.repository }}
  queue: max

jobs:
  verify:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      # build candidate
      # run integration/verification
      # run attestations as needed
      - name: Verify candidate
        run: |
          set -euo pipefail
          ./scripts/verify-release-candidate.sh

  promote:
    needs: verify
    if: ${{ success() }}
    steps:
      - name: Publish only after success
        run: |
          set -euo pipefail
          # select by digest / candidate reference
          ./scripts/promote-release.sh

This prevents out-of-order releases, removes dependency on runner/tool bundling, and avoids scenarios where failures leave user-facing tags published even though verification ultimately failed.

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