feat(nightly-publish): publish Open VSX pre-releases, skip on release merge

[edelauna]

Related GitHub Issue

Closes: #784

Description

Publishes nightly pre-release builds to Open VSX in addition to the VS Code Marketplace, and adds a guard so the release-PR merge back into main doesn't also trigger a redundant nightly pre-release.

Open VSX pre-release publishing

The workflow previously skipped Open VSX for nightlies, with a comment claiming Open VSX has no pre-release concept. That was incorrect — verified against the Open VSX server source (ExtensionVersionJooqRepository.findLatestQuery, eclipse-openvsx/openvsx) and confirmed live against the real ZooCodeOrganization.zoo-code listing:

• The pre-release alias correctly isolates pre-release-flagged versions.
• The latest alias resolves to the highest semver across stable and pre-release, using the pre-release flag only as a tie-breaker at identical major.minor.patch. A nightly build can therefore transiently become latest until the next stable release outranks it — the same trade-off already accepted for Marketplace pre-release publishing, since both track "newest published version."

The Open VSX publish step intentionally omits ovsx publish --pre-release: for an already-packaged .vsix (built earlier in the job via vsce package --pre-release), ovsx ignores that flag and warns that it's a no-op — the pre-release marker is already baked into the VSIX's Microsoft.VisualStudio.Code.PreRelease manifest property, which is what Open VSX actually reads.

Skip on release merge

The release runbook (.roo/commands/release.md) squash-merges release PRs into main with the commit message chore: prepare v[version] release, after the tag has already been pushed and stable has already shipped. Without a guard, that merge would also trigger a nightly pre-release publish of code that was just released as stable. Added a "Skip if this push is a release merge" step that checks:

1. The commit subject against the release-prep message pattern, and
2. Whether a GitHub release already exists for the current src/package.json version (belt-and-suspenders if the message convention ever drifts).

gh release view failures are distinguished by message: "release not found" is the expected non-match; anything else (auth/API failure) fails the step loudly instead of silently falling through to a publish.

Duplicate-publish logging

The Open VSX publish step now checks ovsx's output for "is already published" and logs that the version was skipped rather than unconditionally claiming a fresh publish — --skip-duplicate returns success without actually publishing in that case.

Test Procedure

• Manually built a pre-release VSIX with vsce package --pre-release and confirmed the Microsoft.VisualStudio.Code.PreRelease manifest property is set.
• Published a real test pre-release to the ZooCodeOrganization.zoo-code Open VSX listing and confirmed via the registry API that the pre-release alias correctly isolated it while latest tracked highest-semver as expected.
• Verified the release-merge skip regex against real historical release commits (chore: prepare v3.64.0 release (#729), chore: prepare v3.62.0 release (#658)) and against a normal feature commit, confirming correct match/no-match in both directions.
• Verified gh release view error handling against three cases: version not found, version found (existing stable release v3.64.0), and an invalid token (401) — confirmed each takes the correct branch.
• Verified the duplicate-skip log message against both a real ovsx "already published" response and a real publish-success response.

Pre-Submission Checklist

• Issue Linked: This PR is linked to an approved GitHub Issue (see "Related GitHub Issue" above).
• Scope: My changes are focused on the linked issue (one major feature/fix per PR).
• Self-Review: I have performed a thorough self-review of my code.
• Testing: New and/or updated tests have been added to cover my changes (if applicable).
• Documentation Impact: I have considered if my changes require documentation updates (see "Documentation Updates" section below).
• Contribution Guidelines: I have read and agree to the Contributor Guidelines.

Documentation Updates

• No documentation updates are required.

Additional Notes

This is a CI/workflow-only change (.github/workflows/nightly-publish.yml); there's no application code path to unit test. Verification was done by exercising the actual ovsx/gh commands and shell logic locally against the real registry and repo, as detailed in the Test Procedure above.

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