Release publishing cancelled: cargo-publish build job stuck waiting for unavailable runner label

[Xuanwo]

Summary

Recent releases did not publish to crates.io because the Publish Rust crate workflow was cancelled, not because cargo publish failed.

The build job was queued waiting for a runner with label ubuntu-2404-8x-x64 for ~24 hours and then got cancelled by GitHub.

Impact

• crates.io publish did not happen for:
  • v1.0.4 (2026-01-26)
  • v1.0.3 (2026-01-21)
  • v1.0.2 (2026-01-13)
  • v1.0.1 (2025-12-30)

Root cause

The workflow file embedded in the v1.0.x tags (coming from release/v1.0) requests a runner label that is not available:

# from tag v1.0.4
.github/workflows/cargo-publish.yml
25:    runs-on: ubuntu-2404-8x-x64

As a result, the build job never gets a runner.

Evidence

Runs (all show build cancelled, runner_id=0, label ubuntu-2404-8x-x64)

• https://github.com/lance-format/lance/actions/runs/21376226393 (v1.0.4)
• https://github.com/lance-format/lance/actions/runs/21229368805 (v1.0.3)
• https://github.com/lance-format/lance/actions/runs/20972368940 (v1.0.2)
• https://github.com/lance-format/lance/actions/runs/20604330550 (v1.0.1)

Example jobs payload (v1.0.4):

{"name":"build","conclusion":"cancelled","labels":["ubuntu-2404-8x-x64"],"runner_id":0,"html_url":"https://github.com/lance-format/lance/actions/runs/21376226393/job/61532881931"}

Log excerpt: job waiting for runner (v1.0.2)

2026-01-13T20:58:43.9150000Z Requested labels: ubuntu-2404-8x-x64
2026-01-13T20:58:43.9150000Z Job defined at: lance-format/lance/.github/workflows/cargo-publish.yml@refs/tags/v1.0.2
2026-01-13T20:58:43.9150000Z Waiting for a runner to pick up this job...

Log excerpt: failure reporter sees build as cancelled and skips issue creation (v1.0.4)

job-results: {
  "build": {
    "result": "cancelled",
    "outputs": {}
  }
}
...
No job failures detected, skipping issue creation

Proposed fix

• Update .github/workflows/cargo-publish.yml on release/v1.0 to use a working runner label (for example warp-ubuntu-latest-x64-8x, which is already used on main/release/v2.0).
• After that, re-run publishing via workflow dispatch from main (recommended) for the missed tags, e.g. tag=v1.0.4.

Notes

The current Report Workflow Failure action only creates issues for failure results. For this incident, the workflow ended in cancelled, so it did not automatically open an issue.

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Parts of this issue were drafted with assistance from Codex (with gpt-5.2) and fully reviewed and edited by me. I take full responsibility for all changes.