The staging poller swallowed every failure identically, so a run that
timed out told us only that the expected release never appeared — not
whether the proxy refused us, the endpoint was down, or the containers
were still serving an older build. The public staging proxy also answers
403 to urllib's default user agent while the release endpoint is healthy,
which looked exactly like a deployment that never arrived.
Identify the poller, and report each distinct observation once: HTTP
status, connection failure type, invalid JSON, or the release identities
actually reported. The timeout error carries the last observation and the
identity it wanted. Responses and the base URL stay out of the logs —
only validated sha/build_id fields are echoed back.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>