flake.nix fetches the release tarballs and carries their SRI hashes in a generated block. The cut tool builds the release locally with the toolchain gates.yml pins, in a normalized nine-variable environment, writes the hashes into flake.nix, and commits it with build.zig.zon as the single bump commit. The package job verifies the pins on the bump commit and the publish job verifies them again on the tag, before anything is uploaded.
The tarballs are written by dist_stage (std.tar.Writer, flate gzip) instead of the runner's tar and gzip, and -ffile-prefix-map keeps checkout paths out of the C objects; two checkouts at different absolute paths produce byte-identical archives. nxdns version, /api/version and the admin footer report the version only: the bump commit cannot know its own sha.
the gate recomputes the previous release tag's ddl fingerprint from the
remote peeled object and compares it against the tree's; a change must
be disclosed by 'resets your query history' in the version's changelog
section. the 0.0.9 reset shipped with an announcement claiming no
schema change; this makes the impact mechanical instead of remembered.
mokhtar