r34 HF Astropy reference-cache correction — 2026-10-14

This is the retained 14 October Astropy-maintenance record. Its baseline hash, validation and verifier identify that revision. The current full r34 archive retains this correction and includes workflow reliability and Assistant consolidation. Use the current package verification command for the latest archive.

Baseline full release SHA-256: 3efc7ec755a0b1558c047fd86191c1014295a1ff3f6eff9efe88b563fd2dfb29.

Correction

The native HF worker sets XDG_CACHE_HOME=/work/cache. Astropy 7.1.1 attempts creation of a legacy-to-XDG cache symlink when /work/cache/astropy is absent. The worker's existing confinement correctly rejects that operation and Astropy reports CacheMissingWarning with PermissionError.

The monitor now creates a regular /work/cache/astropy directory before launching the restricted process. Existing checks reject a symbolic link, file or other non-directory at each path component. The syscall and filesystem restrictions are unchanged. This does not suppress warnings or change Astropy dependencies.

Execution and data behavior

Every run still executes its requested calculations. This change creates an empty per-attempt directory for reference-data cache metadata; it does not cache simulation outcomes, reuse prior outputs, share user data, modify ephemeris freshness rules, refetch frozen snapshots, or change occultation checks. The existing native-job cleanup removes the working directory contents after an attempt. Shared scientific calculations, standalone execution and Docker execution are unchanged.

Validation and release evidence

Only targeted tests are rerun: actual Astropy with PF's existing seccomp filter, legacy-warning reproduction and corrected-directory behavior, unsafe-path rejection, worker/confinement tests, and release-receipt/schema integrity checks. The command receipt and JUnit records in validation_r34_astropy_cache_fix/ report exact executed counts and skips. Historical validation remains unchanged. These checks are not a full scientific regression or a live HF deployment test.

Verify the complete extracted release:

python release_tools/package_r34_astropy_cache_fix.py verify --package

HF patch

The scientific HF Job loads pf_hf_native/runner.py from the pinned private code archive. Therefore the small patch updates both that archive and matching controller files/manifests and code pins. A controller-only upload is insufficient. The runtime image does not need rebuilding. The patch reconstructs the new code archive from the previous local code archive without extracting the full release. Use the patch's included Windows deployment guide and preserve existing backups.