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.
querylog.db carries a schema version; migrations run at startup as one transaction after a vacuumed 0600 backup, and every failure refuses startup (exit 2, no systemd restart loop) instead of starting empty. corruption is the only automatic recreate left. the cut gate now requires a fixture-proven migration or an explicit versioned break with restore instructions, and locks shipped migration files and fixtures byte-for-byte.
waiting for a slot now spends the query budget; truncated attempts that
expire fault the budget, not the upstream, and are never attributed.
admission sweeps in priority order before blocking. forward zones spend
read_timeout_ms once across udp, truncation and tcp. adds
nxdns_upstream_budget_exhausted_total and a 64-upstream validation limit.
mokhtar