Twenty-four of the last sixty staging pushes were pure documentation, yet each
one ran (and cancelled) the full gate and image publish. Introduce
deploy/gated-paths.txt as the single source of truth for what must rerun the
gate: every Dockerfile COPY source, the Python package inputs, the workflow and
build-context files, and the repository files frontend/tests read at gate time.
Both triggers of backend-quality-gate.yml now carry that exact list; pushes
that touch none of it neither run the gate nor cancel a running code gate.
Because staging head may then legitimately sit ahead of the last tested SHA,
add deploy/is-docs-only-range.sh: it proves <base> is an ancestor of <head>
and that no changed path matches a gated glob, from local history when it is
available and otherwise from the Gitea compare API (per-commit `files`, parent
walk for ancestry, total_commits cross-checked). The publish dispatch and the
deploy-staging head checks accept an advanced head only when that script
succeeds; diverged, older, or code-bearing heads are still refused. In
deploy-staging the check runs after the gate-attested controller bundle is
extracted so only the tested checker and path list are ever executed; the
manual rollback branch is unchanged.
AGENTS.md §6.3/§6.4 describe the new contract: `.deployment.gitCommit` must
equal the latest staging commit that touched a gated path, not staging head.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VawU7Xfd5jS9wUEXz1XYmS
Jesse_Chen