A release publishes an artifact for every supported target or it is not published

What it means

share/distribution.yaml marks a target supported, experimental or unavailable. A release publishes an artifact for every target in the first two states. There is no state in which a release exists, is offered by latest.json, and has nothing for a platform the documentation lists.

How it works

Three independent refusals, at three moments:

• the build matrix is fail-fast, so one target failing to build stops the run;
• publication is a separate job that begins only when every build has succeeded;
• scripts/release-record, which writes the record from the artifacts that were actually uploaded, refuses to write one that is missing a supported target, and the typed check behind it (Release::findings) is also what majordomus distribution validate runs over every committed record.

Completeness is judged against the set the release was published against, which the record snapshots in required_targets rather than recomputing. Adding a platform to the model is a promise about the next release: v0.3.1 cannot grow a riscv64 artifact however the model changes afterwards, and a check that said otherwise would turn every historical record invalid the day a target was added — which is what it did, until the first real release made it visible. The enforcement point is publication, where release-record sees the model of its own day and refuses a partial release with exit 10. A record written before the field existed carries no set and is judged on internal consistency alone.

The public metadata is generated from that record, so a record that could not be written is metadata that does not exist, and latest.json keeps pointing at the release before it.

How to see it

majordomus distribution validate            # every record against the model
bash test/run.sh 87_release_pipeline        # including a recorder given an empty directory

What it does not cover

A target the model marks unavailable is documented with its reason and is not built; the installer refuses it by name rather than pretending. That is the supported way to not ship a platform — silently omitting one is what this claim forbids.

Why it exists

The half-published release is the classic distribution failure: the tag looks green, the release page has five archives instead of six, and the sixth platform's users get a 404 from an installer that was told the platform exists. Making completeness a property of the record rather than of anyone's attention means the failure happens in CI, before anyone has downloaded anything.