CircleCI vs werf

werf publishes the same work across alpha, beta, ea and stable channels plus a 3.x dev line, so one fix surfaces three or four times under different version numbers. This pair is that pattern exactly: v3.3.0 carries two features — writing authenticated secret values from deploy, and renderPatches support — plus four fixes, and v2.77.2 carries the same four fixes and nothing else. The fixes are the usual build-engine territory: buildah imports failing on symlinked paths, a panic when a stapel base image disappears mid-commit, a cache repo pointing at itself, and host-cleanup misreporting what it pruned.

The division of labour between the lines is now explicit — 2.x takes only fixes, 3.x takes fixes plus everything new. This is the first window where the 3.x dev line carries user-facing deploy function rather than build internals and gated experiments, which moves it from a place to accumulate changes toward something with its own reason to exist. The build-engine hardening under parallelism continues underneath both.

renderPatches and authenticated secret writes are both deploy-side, so the next 3.x releases likely continue there rather than returning to buildah. Whether the embedded deno work behind its build tag connects to the render path is still not stated.