A cancel request does not stop a running step. The runner asks it to end, and a step that ignores the signal keeps going, bounded only by its own timeout-minutes -- 350 for a deploy. Meanwhile the concurrency group holds the newer run on pending until the occupant is terminal, not until it is cancel-requested. Measured on run 32859801382: the cancel was accepted at 15:27:45 and thirteen minutes later ten deploy jobs were still running and the newer run still had not started.
The sweep now waits FORCE_CANCEL_AFTER_SECONDS and force-cancels whatever is still not completed. Cleanup steps are skipped for those, which is the price: the artefacts of an already superseded run help nobody. Only entry-cancel-superseded.yml sets the variable -- a closed pull request and a deleted branch have nothing waiting on the group, so they keep cancelling and walking away.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A long orchestrator sweep sometimes survives its concurrency group: the occupant sits on queued while its matrix waits for runners, cancel-in-progress does not reap it, and the newer run parks on pending until someone cancels the sweep by hand. PR #380 sat that way for nine hours behind a run from the previous commit.
entry-cancel-superseded.yml cancels those leftovers through the API. The group stays primary and untouched: it reaps within seconds and needs no runner, so the fallback normally arrives to find nothing left to do. It carries no concurrency group of its own, because the run holding a group cannot be the run that frees it.
Selection mirrors what the group would have done: cancel every matched run except the newest in the group instance, keyed the way the group is keyed. Not by head SHA, which goes stale while the job waits for a runner and would cancel the newest commit's CI while sparing the stale one. INCLUDE_PATHS keeps the sweep inside the group's own members, so a push to main cannot take the cron workflows with it.
deleted_branch_runs.sh becomes branch_runs.sh, since it now also serves live branches, and the shared parts move to lib.sh. A rejected cancel is logged and the remaining runs are still attempted; only a denied token fails the job.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
kevinveenbirkenbachandClaude Opus 5