fix: stop dropping releases from base-files.json on transient mirror timeouts

[silvervest]

The generator rewrites base-files.json from scratch each run, and a single requests.get(timeout=30) failure (from d7787cd) makes that release vanish from the published index.

You can see resolute failed in this log and was thus missing from https://github.armbian.com/base-files.json: https://github.com/armbian/armbian.github.io/actions/runs/34578429562/job/103196150483

WARNING: skipping release ubuntu/resolute: HTTPConnectionPool(host='archive.ubuntu.com', port=80): Read timed out. (read timeout=30)

Downstream this breaks any build pinning the dropped release, ie RELEASE=resolute fails in artifact-armbian-base-files with found_package_filename is null

This change seeds release_hash from the currently published base-files.json before the loop, so a release that transiently fails to fetch keeps its prior entry instead of disappearing. Seeding is filtered by the wanted releases list, so retiring a release is just removing it there

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• scripts/generate-base-files-info-json.py

Walkthrough

The generator now initializes release_hash from the published base-files.json index. It keeps entries that match wanted release names. If the request fails or the response contains invalid JSON, it uses an empty dictionary.

Priority: ⬇️ Low

Estimated code review effort: 2 (Simple) | ~10 minutes

Change: Bug fix

Suggested reviewers: igorpecovnik

Merge Risk: 🟡 Moderate · up to 43c32

A mirror HTTP error that returns JSON can replace the published release index with an empty result. This defeats the preservation behavior and should be fixed before merge.

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 5

✅ Passed checks (5 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Description check	✅ Passed	The description clearly explains the transient timeout issue and the change that preserves existing release entries in base-files.json.
Title check	✅ Passed	The title clearly and concisely describes the main change: preventing releases from being dropped after transient mirror timeouts.
Docstring Coverage	✅ Passed	No functions found in the changed files to evaluate docstring coverage. Skipping docstring coverage check. Docstring coverage is scoped to functions touched by this diff. Analyzed 0 functions across 1…
Linked Issues check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Out of Scope Changes check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.

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Actionable comments posted: 1

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Inline comments:
In `@scripts/generate-base-files-info-json.py`:
- Line 287: Update the published index fetch in the generation flow to propagate
any request or JSON-read failure instead of replacing it with an empty
dictionary. Ensure the existing exception handler around the requests.get call
does not allow generation to continue with published = {}, so the workflow fails
before writing an incomplete index.

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• scripts/generate-base-files-info-json.py

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[igorpecovnik]

Thanks @silvervest — you had this diagnosed hours before the issue was even filed, from the same log line, and the carry-forward idea is the right instinct: the index should never lose a release just because a mirror blinked.

I've folded your approach into #447 and credited you as co-author there. That PR pairs it with two things this one doesn't cover:

Seeding at release level alone gets overwritten. release_hash[release] = packages assigns wholesale, so the seeded entry only survives when the release fetch itself fails. If the release is reachable but a single architecture times out, the partial packages replaces the seed and that architecture is lost anyway. That is not hypothetical — the same 08:17 run that dropped resolute also dropped questing amd64 and amd64v3, plucky amd64 and jammy-updates amd64 exactly that way, and nobody filed a bug because the failure is invisible unless you diff against the previous index. #447 applies the fallback at both levels.

A 30s timeout with no retry. The underlying fetches now retry with backoff before anything is treated as a failure, so most transients never reach the fallback at all.

Beyond that it keeps fail-closed for the case where there is nothing to fall back on (a release never published before, or a run that could not read the published index), emits a GitHub ::warning whenever an entry is carried forward so a persistently sick mirror stays visible, and adds a guard in the workflow that refuses to publish an index that lost entries relative to the published one.

Closing in favour of #447 — not because anything here is wrong, but to keep it in one place. The core idea is yours.