ci: post CI announcements (main failures, nightly, PR merges) to the private freenet-dev River room

[sanity]

Request

@iduartgomez asked (in the freenet-dev River room) for bot announcements like the team had in Matrix — specifically main CI failures and nightly results — "for visibility and discipline", plus PR merges. @sanity approved proceeding.

Plan

A shared composite action (.github/actions/river-dev-notify) posts to the private freenet-dev room via riverctl, wired into:

• ci.yml — new job that fires only on push to main when CI fails (the merge queue already gates PRs, so a failure here means main itself is red).
• simulation-nightly.yml — mirror the existing nightly-failure notification into the dev room.
• river_pr_merge_notify.yml — mirror the PR-merge notification into the dev room.

The existing public official-room notifications are left in place (this adds the dev room alongside them).

Prerequisites (done)

• riverctl 0.1.70 publishes private-room message sending (feat(cli): send encrypted messages to private rooms river#350) — earlier versions can only post to public rooms.
• Repo secrets RIVER_DEV_ROOM_ID and RIVER_DEV_BOT_CONFIG configured (reusing RIVER_GATEWAY_URL).

PR to follow.

[AI-assisted - Claude]

[github-actions]

🤖 Auto-labeled

Applied labels:

• T-enhancement (95% confidence)
• E-easy (85% confidence)
• A-developer-xp (95% confidence)

Reasoning: This request extends existing CI notification behavior by adding a private freenet-dev River room alongside current public-room notifications — an improvement to developer tooling rather than a bug or wholly new feature. The change is implemented via GitHub Actions and repository secrets and appears straightforward (adding jobs and a composite action), so effort is estimated as easy. It clearly relates to developer experience/CI/CD.

Previous labels: none

If these labels are incorrect, please update them. This helps improve the auto-labeling system.

[sanity]

Issue Priority Assessment

Generated: 2026-06-09T14:11:18.131863223+00:00
Issue hash: 14d2c86e

Value Assessment

This issue has already been implemented. The .github/actions/river-dev-notify composite action exists, and all three workflows (ci.yml, simulation-nightly.yml, river_pr_merge_notify.yml) reference it — matching the plan exactly as described in the issue. The commit 875b97a4 ("ci: announce main CI failures, nightly, and PR merges to the freenet-dev room") in the recent git history confirms this was completed and merged.

This issue is resolved and obsolete. The implementation described — a shared composite action at .github/actions/river-dev-notify wired into all three workflow files — is fully in place. There is no remaining work.

Given that the issue is already closed out in code, its value for prioritization purposes is zero. It should be marked closed if it hasn't been already. For historical reference: the underlying need (team visibility into CI health via River instead of Matrix) was real and low-effort to satisfy, representing a solid developer-experience improvement. It had no impact on end users but meaningfully supported team discipline around keeping main green, which in turn benefits contribution quality. It did not block other work but complemented the merge-queue CI gates already in place. There was modest urgency at the time since the team had an active River room with no bot coverage, but that gap is now closed. No further action is warranted.

Cost Assessment

The issue has already been implemented — .github/actions/river-dev-notify exists and river_pr_merge_notify.yml is already present. This was closed as completed in commit 875b97a ("ci: announce main CI failures, nightly, and PR merges to the freenet-dev room"). The issue is not actionable — all the work described has already been done.

Relevance Check: This issue is fully implemented and closed. The composite action .github/actions/river-dev-notify was created, and the three workflow files (ci.yml, simulation-nightly.yml, river_pr_merge_notify.yml) were wired up as planned. No rethinking required because there is nothing left to do.

Scope: At the time of implementation, changes touched four files: the new composite action directory plus modifications to three existing workflow YAML files. This was a narrow CI-only change with no impact on application code, Rust sources, or any production subsystem.

Complexity and Risk: The implementation is straightforward YAML plumbing — adding a workflow job that calls a shared composite action. The only non-trivial concern was the check-token-coalesce.yml guard (which enforces that new event-emitting steps use RELEASE_PAT rather than bare GITHUB_TOKEN), but that's a well-established pattern in this repo. Risk of regression was essentially zero since these are additive notification jobs with no effect on the build/test pipeline itself.

External Dependencies and Testing: The prerequisites (riverctl 0.1.70 private-room support, RIVER_DEV_ROOM_ID and RIVER_DEV_BOT_CONFIG secrets) were noted as already complete at the time the issue was filed. Testing is inherently manual — triggering a CI failure on main or waiting for the nightly run — so no automated test coverage is meaningful here. Bottom line: zero remaining cost, the issue is done.

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Generated by issue-prioritizer

[sanity]

Verified implemented in origin/main (commit 875b97a, PR #4358; confirmed as an ancestor of origin/main).

The implementation adds a composite action and wires it into three workflows:

• `.github/actions/river-dev-notify/action.yml` — composite action that posts a message to the private freenet-dev River room via `riverctl` (best-effort; no-ops with a warning when the dev-room secrets are absent, e.g. on forks).
• `.github/workflows/ci.yml` — `notify_dev_room_main_failure` job (`uses: ./.github/actions/river-dev-notify`) for main CI failures.
• `.github/workflows/river_pr_merge_notify.yml` — `notify_dev_room` job for PR merges.
• `.github/workflows/simulation-nightly.yml` — `notify-dev-room-failure` job for nightly failures.

All four files are present in origin/main and reference the composite action. Closing as resolved.

[AI-assisted - Claude]