I published, verified the version, and my users still got the old file

First thread in here, so I'll say what this forum is for, since that's the thing you're actually deciding about if you follow it.

Not release notes. One thing I got wrong, each time, with enough detail that you can go and check whether you have the same problem. The checklist has 4,352 items in it and nearly every one exists because somebody, usually me, found out the hard way. This is where I write those up while they're still embarrassing.

Here's the first, from Wednesday.

I shipped a release. Checked the version on the registry, correct. Checked the pinned CDN URL, correct, new data in it. All green.

Then I checked the URL people actually use, the one with @latest in it, and it was still serving the previous release. Same path, different content, no error anywhere. Anyone following my own install instructions would have got the old version while every check I ran was telling me the new one was live.

The CDN had cached the @latest alias and had no reason to expire it just because I published something. There is a purge endpoint. I'd written a note to myself months ago saying it existed and was untested, which is a sentence I apparently wrote and then never went back to.

What gets me is that I verified the release three separate ways and all three were true statements about something nobody uses. The pinned URL is correct and irrelevant. The registry version is correct and irrelevant. The only URL that mattered was the one I had not thought to check, because it isn't a version, it's an alias, and aliases don't turn up in a release checklist.

It's an item now. If you publish anything to a CDN, go and check your alias rather than your tag.