ci(release): retry the npm version check before failing the release

[woladi]

Problem

publish-registry verifies the release with npm view "pseudonym-mcp@$VERSION" version immediately after the release job finishes changeset publish. npm's read replicas lag a successful publish by tens of seconds, so that lookup can 404 on a version that was just published.

That is what happened on 0.9.0 (run 32844937782): npm error 404 No match found for version 0.9.0 although the publish had succeeded. The whole Release run went red, the registry publish was skipped, and it had to be recovered manually with gh workflow run release.yml --ref master -f publish_registry=true.

Fix

The npm view call is now a bounded retry — up to 6 attempts, 10s apart, roughly a minute of grace — and only then fails the step. The guard is unchanged in intent: if npm genuinely does not have the version after the retries, the step still fails loudly rather than letting the registry point at a version npm never published.

The server.json sync check above it stays immediate and non-retried: a stale manifest is not something waiting can fix.

Verification

• release.yml round-trips through a YAML parser unchanged.
• The step's shell script passes bash -n, and was run under bash -e against a stubbed npm/sleep in three cases: available immediately (1 lookup, exit 0), available on the 3rd attempt (exit 0, no spurious failure), never available (6 attempts, then exit 1 with the loud message).

🤖 Generated with Claude Code