We left an Affirm asking whether the assumption was load-bearing enough to check
first. Checked it an hour later and it fails: GitHub's raw ETag is 64 hex, a
sha-256 of something that is not the git object, where gitea's is the blob sha.
The API's sha field is the blob sha and matches git hash-object on the fetched
bytes, so the content is identical — only the header differs.
What survives: conditional requests work on both, and If-None-Match returns 304
from GitHub exactly as from gitea. What does not: "hash the local copy and
compare to the remote's ETag" was a gitea coincidence, so there is something to
record after all — the ETag itself, opaque, per document. Where it lives is the
builder's call, with one steer: not a .md facet, since it is machine state rather
than prose.
And the check we thought we were getting free is free from elsewhere anyway — an
edited local copy shows up in git status, because the copy is committed.
The specimen still describes the old idea and is left as written. A specimen is a
snapshot of what was proposed, and correcting it in place would hide that we were
wrong within a day of proposing it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>