Summary

The release-stable.yml pipeline run #53 fails on the Python Lint (.github/skills/experimental/powerpoint) / Ruff Lint and Format Check job, which blocks the release-please job from creating a stable release PR.

Root Cause Analysis

This failure was exposed by PR #1043, which added -Force to Get-ChildItem calls in release-stable.yml and pr-validation.yml. Before that fix, Get-ChildItem -Recurse could not traverse hidden directories like .github/, so the discover-python-projects job never found the powerpoint skill and python-lint was always skipped.

With -Force in place, the powerpoint skill is now correctly discovered and linted. Pre-existing ruff violations in the skill cause the lint job to fail.

Why PR validation did not catch this

The python-lint reusable workflow is called with different parameters in each pipeline:

PR #1043 changed only YAML workflow files. With changed-files-only: true, zero Python files were linted during PR validation, so the pre-existing violations were invisible.

Dependency chain to release-please

The release-please job depends on python-lint via its needs: list. PR #1043 added an if: ${{ !cancelled() && !failure() }} guard to handle the skip case (no Python projects found). However, when python-lint genuinely fails (as in run #53), failure() returns true and release-please is correctly blocked.

Fixing the ruff violations resolves the genuine failure, allowing python-lint to pass and release-please to proceed.

Violations Found

ruff check (3 errors)

• tests/test_build_deck.py:920 — E501 line too long (92 > 88)
• tests/test_build_deck.py:940 — E501 line too long (92 > 88)
• tests/test_build_deck.py:954 — E501 line too long (93 > 88)

ruff format (7 files)

• scripts/build_deck.py
• scripts/extract_content.py
• scripts/pptx_colors.py
• tests/test_build_deck.py
• tests/test_render_pdf_images.py
• tests/test_validate_deck.py
• tests/test_validate_slides.py

All paths relative to .github/skills/experimental/powerpoint/.

Additional Discovery

The same hidden-directory bug (Get-ChildItem -Recurse without -Force) was present in two local linting scripts:

• scripts/linting/Invoke-PythonLint.ps1 (line 38)
• scripts/linting/Invoke-PythonTests.ps1 (line 44)

Running npm run lint:py locally produced "No Python skills found" before the fix. Adding -Force resolves this.

Fix

• Apply ruff format to 7 Python files in the powerpoint skill
• Apply ruff check --fix to resolve 3 E501 line-too-long violations
• Add -Force to Get-ChildItem in Invoke-PythonLint.ps1 and Invoke-PythonTests.ps1

Branch: fix/ruff-lint-powerpoint-skill

Validation

All checks pass locally after the fix:

• ruff check . — 0 errors
• ruff format --check . — all files formatted
• npm run lint:py — "Found 1 Python skill(s)", all passed
• npm run lint:ps — 93 files, 0 issues