Files
at-container-registry/pkg/hold/gc
Evan JarrettandClaude Opus 5 3ceedc8bb5 hold/gc: time an orphaned record from when it was seen, not when it was written
The aux-record sweep decided whether a record was old enough to collect from a
timestamp inside the record body, which for scan records is scannedAt. Every
rescan rewrites that, so the grace clock reset continuously and a hold with a
rescan_interval shorter than the grace period could never collect an orphaned
scan record at all.

Grace now measures how long a slot has been continuously observed orphaned
across analysis passes. The key deliberately excludes the CID so a rescan
rewriting the record in place does not restart the clock, and the check runs
last, after the manifest, reachability and co-ownership tests, so a record
judged live never accrues orphan age. A pass that errors partway commits
nothing rather than resetting the clock on slots it never reached.

The clock is in memory, so a restart forgets every observation and each
surviving orphan starts its grace again. That delays collection and can never
advance it, which is the safe direction, but it does mean a hold restarting
more often than the grace period will not collect aux orphans. Persisting it
wants a table in pkg/hold/db and is left for later.

Applied to both aux collections rather than only to scan records. For image
configs the new rule is strictly more conservative, since a record cannot be
observed before it is written, and a per-collection table of which timestamps
are safe to trust is a thing to maintain and to get quietly wrong.

One widening beyond the reported bug, called out rather than left to be found:
a record whose body timestamp is unparseable used to be kept forever, because
the zero time read as in-grace. It is now collected on the normal schedule,
having cleared every other guard plus a full grace period.

Also corrects the comment claiming these records hold no blob references. Scan
records carry sbomBlob and vulnReportBlob; they live under a prefix the blob
sweep never walks, so deleting the record frees nothing, and a future sweep for
that space must read those fields before the record goes.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01U1Km3N3uUmeGaj7VbaM8PF
2026-09-05 16:14:35 -05:00
..