A channel dispatch sends both `channel` and `build_commit` (the commit is
provenance, not a mode), so the tag/commit staging steps — gated on
`inputs.build_commit != ''` — ran inside a channel build. There a pinned
request forces HERMES_PAYLOAD_TAG and HERMES_BUILD_COMMIT empty, so the step
fell through to tag mode and handoff refused the empty tag:
ValueError: Invalid release handoff identity (scripts/releases/handoff.py:24)
Channel packages are already staged by the pinned-request step, so gate both
per-platform staging steps on the channel signal the rest of the workflow
uses. The commit-only status page had the same flaw one job later: it would
fetch commit-namespace receipts a channel build never wrote and publish a
false "not built" matrix under releases/commit/<sha>/. The channel flow
renders its own page in publish-channel.
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