v0.1.0-rc3 no longer exists anywhere -- not local, not gh, not origin, not
gitea. Verified here independently before changing anything; the releases are
untouched (rc1, rc2, and there never was an rc3 release).
THREE MEASUREMENTS OF ONE FACT IN ONE SESSION, and only the first was careless:
1. present on all three remotes and locally (from aa4e901's commit message)
2. on gh alone (git ls-remote, this branch)
3. nowhere at all (git ls-remote, now)
Reading 1 was asserted rather than asked, and correcting it was right. Readings
2 and 3 were each taken correctly, by two different people, and they disagree --
because the tag was deleted in between. So the lesson this section reached for
was too weak. It is not "ask rather than assert"; it is that A REMOTE-SHAPED
FACT HAS A SHELF LIFE EVEN AFTER YOU ASK. A verified answer decays, and prose
cannot distinguish a stale line from a live one, so a reader following
RELEASING.md at 2am has no way to tell which they are holding.
WHAT CHANGES. The present-tense inventory goes, everywhere I put it:
RELEASING.md's "It is on gh only; origin and gitea carry rc1 and rc2", the same
clause's "the mirrors did not agree", tooling.md's "rc3 is on gh alone", and
"pushed to gh" in both tooling.md and the script header -- that last one named a
specific remote too, and we do not actually know which remotes the push reached.
rc3 survives as a plainly historical example: it was pushed while every crate
still said 0.1.0-rc2, dist refused, no release was built. Nothing about where it
is now.
WHAT STAYS. The instruction to ask -- `git tag -l`, `git ls-remote --tags
<remote>` -- because that is the part that ages well: it tells the reader to
look rather than to believe. And the record that aa4e901's claim was wrong when
checked, which is durable precisely because its subject is a fixed text. Note
which half of the earlier correction survived and which did not: "the commit
message was wrong" is permanent; "the tag is on gh alone" was true and is now
false. The keeper is the one whose subject cannot change.
Both files now say explicitly that they record no inventory, so the next editor
knows the absence is deliberate rather than an omission to helpfully fill in.
The principle never decayed and is untouched: a wrong tag is left dead and the
next version cut; a published tag is not moved.
No version bumped, no tag cut, no tag deleted by me.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01FC2jVn8Au7E9JPkw6bwXXH
Edward Langley
7d12ada45d