The v3.8.50 publish died at `Prove clean-install AND upgrade-over-previous both
boot` — timed out after 30 minutes. Not a defect found: the gate never got to
finish.
The log says why, once you read past the first line:
03:42:49 packing v3.8.50…
04:07:28 PHASE A — clean install of the packed tarball
04:13:08 timeout
`npm pack` alone took **24m37s**, leaving 5 minutes for two installs and two
boots. The budget was never going to hold.
Worth naming: this gate landed in #8953 and the 2026-08-27 run was the FIRST to
ever reach it. Every earlier publish died upstream — disk exhaustion, a missing
dist/BUILD_SHA — so `timeout-minutes: 30` had never been measured against a real
execution. It was a guess, and it blew on its debut. Same shape as the rest of
this cycle: a gate that had never been allowed to finish speaking.
Two changes, and the second is the one that matters next time:
- `timeout-minutes: 30` -> `60`, sized to the single measurement available.
- the script now times the pack and prints duration + tarball size. Without it
the log showed `packing…` and then nothing for 30 minutes, which reads like a
hang and is not — raising a limit blind would have been a guess on top of a
guess.
If 60 also proves short, the next log will say exactly which phase ate it.
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