A six-line edit made fifteen units stale. The freshness check was working correctly.
Every unit of this project carries a record of its last verification, and each record pins the configuration it was checked against by hashing it. If the configuration changes, the pin no longer reproduces and the record goes stale, which is exactly what you want: a verification result that quietly outlives its inputs is worse than no result. One afternoon I added a six-line block to that…
A small modification to project configuration led to 15 units becoming outdated. The system's freshness check functioned as intended. The edit was six lines long. Each unit had to undergo a full re-run and attach a new record, consuming significant machine time. The error stemmed from the pinning mechanism, which indicated whether a configuration had changed.
The pin represented the entire configuration file, not just the individual unit's block. This misinterpretation caused confusion and led to unnecessary re-runs. The solution involved modifying the pin to include only the unit's block and shared sections, rather than the entire file. This change ensured that an edit to a single unit only stalemates that unit, while edits to shared sections would stalemate all units, as they genuinely depended on those sections. This approach addressed the issue effectively and provided a clear, actionable solution.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
