ci: harden releases against branch/tag name collisions

[ng]

Summary

Defense-in-depth follow-up to #427 (rolling dev tag rename). Two additions so the same shape of bug — a tag name colliding with a branch name, which made git fetch --tags fail and silently blocked every versioned release on main — can't silently recur.

• release.yml: run git fetch --tags --force --prune --prune-tags origin before semantic-release. semantic-release itself runs git fetch --tags unconditionally and aborts on any "would clobber existing tag" conflict, so force-pruning up front means a stray colliding tag recovers instead of blocking the release.
• ref-collision-check.yml (new): runs on push to main / dev, fails CI if any branch and tag share a name. Loud early signal instead of a silently-missing GitHub Release.

Neither change touches dev-release.yml — #427 already fixed the original collision by renaming the rolling tag to dev-latest, and v1.6.0 cut cleanly on 2026-04-13 with the tarball attached.

Test plan

• Merge; confirm the new Ref Collision Check job runs green on dev and main
• On the next dev → main merge, confirm Analyze & Release completes git fetch --tags --force and cuts a new versioned release
• (Optional manual test) push a tag named dev to a scratch branch; confirm Ref Collision Check fails with the offending name

Summary by CodeRabbit

• Chores
  • Added automatic validation to detect branch and tag name collisions in the CI/CD pipeline.
  • Enhanced release workflow with improved tag synchronization to ensure clean release processes.

[coderabbitai]

No actionable comments were generated in the recent review. 🎉

ℹ️ Recent review info

⚙️ Run configuration

Configuration used: defaults

Review profile: CHILL

Plan: Pro

Run ID: f270dc3a-5876-41f1-9352-cebebdc5b859

📥 Commits

Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between 5fc3a7f and 34322c5.

📒 Files selected for processing (2)

• .github/workflows/ref-collision-check.yml
• .github/workflows/release.yml

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📝 Walkthrough

Walkthrough

Two GitHub Actions workflows are added/modified: a new collision detection workflow checks for naming conflicts between branches and tags on main/dev branches, while the release workflow now synchronizes remote tags before running semantic-release to prevent stale tag issues.

Changes

Cohort / File(s)	Summary
New Collision Detection Workflow .github/workflows/ref-collision-check.yml	New workflow that detects and reports any collisions between branch and tag names, failing the workflow if conflicts are found.
Release Workflow Enhancement .github/workflows/release.yml	Adds tag synchronization step (git fetch --tags --force --prune --prune-tags origin) before semantic-release execution to ensure local tags are consistent with remote state.

Estimated code review effort

🎯 2 (Simple) | ⏱️ ~10 minutes

Possibly related PRs

• fix: attach pre-built tarball to GitHub releases #272: Modifies .github/workflows/release.yml to enhance tag and release handling, directly related to the release workflow changes in this PR.

Suggested labels

released

Poem

🐰 A rabbit hops through branches and tags,
Checking for collisions, avoiding the snags,
With git synced clean before release day,
No stale tags to lead us astray! 🏷️✨

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 3

✅ Passed checks (3 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Description Check	✅ Passed	Check skipped - CodeRabbit’s high-level summary is enabled.
Title check	✅ Passed	The title clearly and concisely summarizes the main change: adding hardening against branch/tag name collisions in CI workflows.
Docstring Coverage	✅ Passed	No functions found in the changed files to evaluate docstring coverage. Skipping docstring coverage check.

_{✏️ Tip: You can configure your own custom pre-merge checks in the settings.}

✨ Finishing Touches

🧪 Generate unit tests (beta)

• Create PR with unit tests
• Commit unit tests in branch chore/release-tag-collision-guard

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