[kyle-sexton]

Refs: #8958

Summary

This is the single W-7 branch-cleanup PR and supersedes #8959. A daily job, maintenance-delete-stale-branches.yml, deletes the branches whose work is finished. Owner decision (2026-10-22, #8958): no dates. A branch lives as long as its issue is open and is deleted once that issue closes.

Fix

• Job. The job lives in .github/workflows/maintenance-delete-stale-branches.yml, with its rules and tests in .github/scripts/branch-cleanup/. It is REST only, runs no model, and checks out no branch code. Its token can write contents and read issues and pull requests. The lanes kill switch stops it. The schedule deletes; a manual run is a dry-run unless set otherwise, and in dry-run the client refuses every request but GET.
• Never touched. The default branch, and branches under release/*, dependabot/* and gh-readonly-queue/*.
• Kept. A protected branch or one a ruleset applies to; a branch with an open pull request; a lane branch while its issue is open; any other branch while an issue its newest pull request links is open.
• For a person. A non-lane branch that never had a pull request; a merged branch with commits ahead of the default branch; a closed-unmerged branch whose tip moved; a branch whose read failed.
• Deleted. A branch whose pull request is closed or merged and whose linked issues are all closed, or that links no issue; also a lane branch with no pull request whose issue closed. A lanes-App stop or resume marker no longer keeps a branch once its issue is closed. There is no min-age-days key.
• Per-run safety. A run deletes at most max-deletes-per-run (default 25), in listing order. Before each delete the job re-reads the branch tip and the open pull requests from and into the branch. Every delete appends {repo, branch, sha, rule, issue, pr, deletedAt} to the step summary and to the ledger artifact.
• Call budget (fixes Codex's P2 on feat(pr-pipeline): delete stale branches daily by the branch-cleanup rule #8959). Before evaluating any branch, the job reserves 4 calls per planned delete from the 600-call budget. It evaluates with the rest and stops once it has found max-deletes-per-run candidates or spent that share; the branches after that wait for the next run. Before this fix, about 300 deletable branches used up the whole budget during evaluation, so every planned delete failed its re-read and nothing was deleted.
• Config. The branch-cleanup leaf (max-deletes-per-run) is in pr-pipeline.yaml and its schema. branchCleanupFromBase is in resolve-config. The README has a "Branch cleanup" section. There is a changelog fragment under .changes/pr-pipeline/.

Still open from #8958: item 1 (atomic compare-and-delete) and item 2 (split plan from delete). That is why this PR uses Refs:.

Verification

• node --test in .github/scripts/branch-cleanup/: 20 pass, 0 fail. The new budget test uses the real client() over a stubbed fetch. It covers 300 deletable branches under a 600-call budget, and the run deletes 25. Before the fix it failed: 0 deleted. The tests for issue lifetime failed on the pre-change rules: a stopped run's branch is kept while its issue is open and deleted once it closes, and a closed PR branch with no linked issue is deleted.

• node --test in .github/actions/resolve-config/: 551 pass, 0 fail.

• scripts/check-affected.sh: 9 passed, 4 skipped, 0 failed.

• Live dry run: not run by the implementer. The owner should run this and paste the summary here:

  env -C <worktree> GITHUB_TOKEN="$(gh auth token)" REPOSITORY=melodic-software/claude-code-plugins DRY_RUN=true BASE_PATH=<worktree> node .github/scripts/branch-cleanup/cleanup.mjs

Related

• Supersedes feat(pr-pipeline): delete stale branches daily by the branch-cleanup rule #8959
• feat(pr-pipeline): harden the branch-cleanup job (atomic delete, plan/delete split, stopped-run branches) #8958

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[chatgpt-codex-connector]

Codex Review Summary

This comment shows the latest Codex review activity on this pull request.

Review	Status	Commit	Review trigger
📝 Code Review	✅ Completed 2026-10-22T01:55:11.550474Z	9c20bb6	Draft marked ready

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[github-actions]

claude-security-review reviewed 6c1af60ab297afe536c22f9df65d3a0b658777b0: 0 finding(s), 0 as inline comments.

Security review (incremental, 9c20bb6 → 6c1af60): no security issues found.

Files read: cleanup.mjs, cleanup.test.mjs, and docs/conventions/pr-pipeline/README.md, from .claude-lane/incremental.diff.

• Change. cleanup.mjs now rotates the start of the branch list by GITHUB_RUN_NUMBER × stride, modulo the list length. Evaluation stops at the cap or call budget as before, and unevaluated counts against the rotated list.
• Input trust. GITHUB_RUN_NUMBER is set by the Actions runner, not by a PR author or branch name. It is parsed with parseInt and falls back to 0 on a non-numeric value. The start offset is taken modulo branches.length, with an empty-list guard, so it cannot go out of range or produce a negative index.
• Delete path. The rotation does not change which branches are deletable or how that is decided. Verdicts, the max-deletes-per-run cap, the call-budget reservation and the delete-time re-read of tip and open PRs are all untouched. Only the evaluation order changes, so no kept or protected branch becomes deletable.
• Tests and docs. The new test mocks fetch and does not touch credentials. The README change is prose only.
• Manifests. No plugin manifest changed, so no manifest <field> lines apply.
• Instruction surfaces. No standing instruction was removed or softened. The README edit replaces "wait for the next run" with the rotation description.

[github-actions]

claude-review reviewed 6c1af60ab297afe536c22f9df65d3a0b658777b0: 0 finding(s), 0 as inline comments.

Code review (incremental, 9c20bb6 → 6c1af60)

No findings. Reviewed cleanup.mjs, cleanup.test.mjs and the pr-pipeline README change against the PR context. Refs: #8958 closes no issue, so there were no acceptance criteria to check.

Change reviewed: the run now starts at (GITHUB_RUN_NUMBER × stride) % branches.length and wraps, with stride = floor(evalLimit / 4). This stops kept branches early in the listing from using up the evaluation share on every run.

Checked by reading the code (cleanup.mjs:141-187):

• No run-number case: with GITHUB_RUN_NUMBER unset or non-numeric, start is 0 and the old behavior is unchanged. With an unlimited budget, stride is 0 and nothing rotates.
• Runner env: the workflow does not set GITHUB_RUN_NUMBER, but the runner provides it, and main() passes process.env. The workflow's env: block is unchanged.
• Coverage per run: a run reads roughly evalLimit / 3 or more branches, since a non-deletable branch costs at most about three reads. That is more than evalLimit / 4, so consecutive starts leave no gap. A branch with several linked issues costs more, and I did not measure how often that happens.
• Mid-run changes: unevaluated is now computed against ordered, so the summary count stays right. Deleting branches between runs changes branches.length, which only moves the start point.
• Test setup: the new test has 493 kept branches (two reads each) ahead of 8 deletable ones. The test setup is consistent with the code: the 8 deletable branches fall inside the windows of runs 2 through 5.

Not verified: I could not run node --test here because the sandbox denied it, so I did not confirm that the new test passes. The PR's claim of 20 passing tests predates this commit and is author-claimed.

Minor, not blocking: the README line 1603 still says the job deletes "in listing order", though the order now starts at a rotated point. The same paragraph explains the rotation, so it is not misleading.

claude-lane: claude-review

[chatgpt-codex-connector]

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