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Netlify's deploy-preview has failed on every recent PR, so its red carries no information #62

Description

@mmcky

netlify/beautiful-dodol-cb9543/deploy-preview reports failure on this repo's pull requests, and has done so continuously across every recent one. It is not detecting anything — it is a check that cannot go green, sitting alongside two checks that can.

Measured

Netlify deploy-preview status on the head commit of the last six PRs:

PR Netlify The repo's own checks
#61 failure build-and-deploy ✅ · data-url-guard
#60 failure green
#58 failure green
#55 failure green
#54 failure green
#53 failure green

#60 is the high_dim_data fold — merged, published, and then independently validated end to end in a separate session against QuantEcon/workspace-lectures#36. So the Netlify red has been ignored, correctly, at least six times running.

Why this is worth fixing rather than tolerating

A check that is always red trains reviewers to skim past red, and this is the repo where that costs the most. ci.yml runs myst build --html with no execution, so a dead data URL is invisible to it — the static pages still return 200 because the build bakes no outputs, and figures only appear after in-browser execution, which dies at the first data cell. This repo's CI already proves less than a reader assumes; a permanently-red check on top of that erodes the little signal the check row carries.

It also has a concrete cost right now. Reviewing the wave A4 repoint (#61) meant establishing from scratch that the Netlify failure was pre-existing rather than caused by the PR — six API calls to answer a question a working check would have answered by turning green.

What to decide

Either fix it — the deploy log at the linked Netlify project should say why it fails, and it may simply be a stale build command or a missing env var after the JupyterLite/Pyodide setup changed — or remove the integration, since GitHub Pages deploy via ci.yml is what actually publishes this site and the Netlify preview duplicates it.

Removing it is defensible: this repo deploys on push to main through actions/deploy-pages, so a preview URL adds little that the merged site does not, and the sibling repos that genuinely benefit from previews (lecture-python-intro, lecture-intro.zh-cn) have working ones.

What is not defensible is leaving a check that reports failure unconditionally.

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