fix(index): add a slot repair for a broken Built stamp and retire alpine 3.21 #150
2026-08-07
fix(index): add a slot repair for a broken Built stamp and retire alpine 3.21
`arm64/alpine321` (22,930 entries) and `arm64/alpine322` (24,696 entries) advertise `Built: R <ver>; NA; ...`. uvr matches the stamp's platform triple plus R minor to pick binary over source, so no client matches those slots and both silently serve as source-only, which is the regression the stamp was added to prevent. The tarballs themselves carry the correct triple; only the index is wrong. Re-running the normal index update does not fix it: `upload_package_index()` reuses the slot's remote `PACKAGES.db` and cranlike's `update_db()` only reparses files whose md5 changed. Dropping `PACKAGES.db` to force a full reparse does work, but for an S3 repo cranlike reads each package's metadata from the CRAN source mirror on GitHub, so a 25k-entry slot means 25k requests to raw.githubusercontent.com and a real risk of being rate-limited part-way. Only the `Built` column is wrong, so correct it in place: patch the column in `PACKAGES.db`, put it back, and let `upload_package_index()` re-emit `PACKAGES*` from it. `update_db()` always rewrites the index files even when nothing was reparsed, so no tarball is re-read and nothing is fetched from GitHub. Alpine 3.21 is EOL: the website advertises only 3.23/3.24 and `process-updates.yaml` dropped it, so remove its two leftover matrix entries from the archive pipeline rather than repairing that slot.